


Case File 95

by supremecourtpizza



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-11-21
Packaged: 2020-05-18 11:23:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 25
Words: 62,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19333546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/supremecourtpizza/pseuds/supremecourtpizza
Summary: A flood of unsolarized blood on the market has been causing resurrections, the heir to the Throne of Rockefeller is an insolent Brat Prince, the Living Defense Force is doing the opposite of defending the living, and they're out of oat milk at the WorkSpace™ matcha latte bar. Necrologist Mia Whitt has always been able to keep her distance from, well, everything; but when a case becomes personal she'll have to ask herself what in this world is worth holding on to.





	1. A Demon in Little Serbia

It had been raining non-stop in Rockefeller for three nights now, though never with the sort of intensity it would take to wash the layer of grime off the streets and down the sewer drains. Instead the water pooled in the valleys of uneven asphalt, grey-tinged and threatening to ruin the only decent pair of boots Mia had. Her shadow moved under the sodium bulb street lights, lengthening and pulling back as it offered a kind of respite from wet shine of pavement that was making her squint her tired eyes. It had taken two metro transfers and a shuttle bus to get home, even with exasperated civic officers herding residents as they grumbled about the rerouted trains and bypassed platforms. With everything that had happened on the city’s central island tonight it was for their own safety, but if there was anything Mia knew about the citizens of her adopted home it was that they did not take kindly to changes in their public transit. As she took a bounding step over a puddle the width of the sidewalk she felt half a pint of undelivered product sloshed in her sling bag. If one were to ask what a devojka like her was doing out at this time of night the answer would be in the eight ounce flask of blood that had most certainly coalesced to an unpalatably ambient temperature by now. If one were to ask why she had set her Drop™ delivery radius to the wealthy neighborhood of Dva Mosta where so few depended on mobile apps and not to the more profitable areas like Little Serbia or Cinder Hill or even Trokut, the answer would be found in the hashtags trending on the Feed.

The sky that had been a starless, washed out black for several hours was starting to tint blue, alerting those that were slinking around outside of the corner radnja to head back home. Mia stepped out of the rain and under the cover of scaffolding that had encircled this particular block since even before she moved to the neighborhood. The lidded eye visage of a man watched her and mumbled some comment that was little more than a reflex in the presence of a unaccompanied young woman. Just inside the tiny store, she reached into the radnja’s cooler for a bottle of cardamom-infused vanilla plant-protein almond milk, a product that was steadily taking up more and more refrigerated real estate that had formerly belonged to malt liquor. No words were exchanged as she flashed the beverage up to the cashier’s eye line and placed the necessary cash on the counter. He was busy with a small screen and the game happening on it. Mia downed the sweet and chalky drink as she walked. Dva Mosta was not the kind of neighborhood to host the small and usually dirty to the point of unsanitary establishments that were the infamous chain Burek Express, and so she had ended the night with an excess of product in her bag and a deficit of greasy, meaty pita in her stomach. The drink was emptied by the front door of her building.

She wiped droplets of rain off the lens of the entrance camera, waiting for her face to register and match the database of residents. An electronic voice welcomed her, the light on the self-sanitizing door handle turned green, and Mia stepped into the downstairs lobby of Dwell™: A Modern Living Solution. A few flights of stairs brought Mia to the second from top level of the low rise, concrete construction building that had once housed working class families, and into the co-housing’s communal lounge. Several pieces of intentional mismatched furniture occupied the open space, as did laptop friendly work surfaces, bike storage, and a foosball table, and a sign-up sheet to reserve the beanbag filled screening room for you and your friends’ next movie night. Mia walked past this all with the intent of making her way uninterrupted to the corridor that contained Cube by Dwell™ number A4, which was the seven foot square box that contained her bed and every personal item she owned, but made it no further than the open concept shared kitchen when she was stopped dead in her path.

“Well, fuck.”

She had caught the figure out of the corner of her eye, a hazy and vaguely human shaped entity floating a few inches off the ground near the built in rice cooker. The thing had quivered at her words. Whether or not it could sense if it had been seen depended on your ideology when it came to demons, but the thing that was more shadow than solid moved across the kitchen and sunk into the darkness of corridor C. Mia looked longly down corridor A, thinking of her bed, then thinking of the time two apartments ago when she had willfully ignored a mouse and later found a nest of little pink pups under her sink, and followed the intrusive entity. It stopped and hovered near the bathrooms at the end of the hallway and Mia stopped in front of Cube C2, where she rapped her knuckles on the semi-opaque acrylic until the was the sound of someone rousing and undoing their lock.

“What? What time is it?” a young man dressed in his undershirt opened the door, rubbing his face and reaching for a pair of glasses on his wardrobe shelf

“Time to tell me why there’s a demon manifesting in our kitchen.” 

“I- that- you don’t know that I-”

Mia sighed and before her bleary eyes friend could register what happened she had pulled a silver blade from her boot, taken his hand, and pressed the edge into his flipped up palm enough to dent the flesh but not break it. All at once the shape that had been idle at the end of the hallway rushed forward, meeting Mia with as much force as a barely tangible thing could muster and then sinking back through a wall.

“I think I know what living soul it’s teathed itself too.” she said, sheathing her blade and ignoring the breathless, almost anxious feeling a brush with such an entity could cause. “Didn’t I tell you that if you didn’t unpack that emotional baggage of yours this was bound to happen? Get that thing out of my fucking house.”

The young man winced at her words “I don’t have the right coverage plan….for that.”

“Light Above, Kit. This really had to happen tonight, huh.” she prodded him in the ribs so he sidestepped and made way for her to step inside the windowless interior space and sit on his bed “You heard about what happened at St. Malo’s.”

“Only what’s on the Feed.”

“Don't look at the Feed, it’s just people regurgitating the same three headlines from the Order and they didn’t even have a necrologist on scene tonight.”

“Did DANA?” Kit moved a pillow and sat beside her, eying the black canvas sling back she took with her on nights she delivered for Drop™.

“Depends on if you call getting stopped by a civic officer for trying to hop the barricades around the LDF’s latest target and then getting told to go the hell home because he knows you're only delivering down in a Lower Angulem neighborhood as a front for trying to get the jump on the story as ‘having a necrologist on scene’ or not.” Mia ran her hands over her head, from her temples to the nape of her neck, shaking rain water out of her short hair and onto Kit’s sheets as she did so. “Taylee from the office, she’s been been having these bullet journal parties every few weeks and I go because, you know, I can draw lines on grid paper, I can draw little swirlies and hearts around the edges. I’ve gotten particularly good at tiny succulents with cartoon faces. But now there’s gossip because I never actually use mine during the week. Some people are saying I only go for the wine which is stupid because I’m fucking twenty six years old, if I just wanted wine I would go buy some myself.”

“What?” he blinked

“And this was the week I was going to use it. I was going to use the fuck out of that bullet journal, I had the whole thing planned. There was fucking meal prep in there. And then what happens? I’m minding my own fucking business and someone goes and decides they’re going plant half a dozen homemade incediaries in the rectory where the Veceslav-Bozhena has put up their clan members displaced from Soldorado, and as if that wasn’t enough of a caseload by itself, turns out the refugees weren’t even in St. Malo’s rectory because they had received a summons to pack their shit and show up at the Royal Keep that same night.”

“So they’re safe? I read- I heard the guy had some kind of manifesto? He was trying to kill….slay….them? I don’t know the word for killing someone that’s already dead.”

“Immorticide.” she said, lying back “End, dust, dispatch, the colloquial terminology varies. Slaying a vampire is little too reminiscent of the kind of stuff that went on in the common era. Though I suppose that’s the LDF’s whole thing, right? Calling themselves the Living Defense Force sounds like some kind of mortal militia in the war that never came.”

“The LDF was involved in this?”

“They’re always involved. Kids don’t get radicalized into acts of anti-vampire domestic terrorism on their own. Maybe they politically disagree with the Queen’s apparent disregard of Rockerfeller’s governing council these past few years, but no one’s born hating vampires. They need that gateway drug of Rockefeller’s biggest ult-nat hate group for that. Rearden Briet’s been blaming every social and economic ill of the city on the refugees now that disparaging the Brat Prince can’t keep his ratings up, it was a matter of time before something like this happened.”

“Is that why they were called to a meeting at Royal Keep? Because of the attack.”

“There was no meeting.” she turned her head to him “They showed up to an empty keep just in time to avoid the attack and leave the LDF looking like a bunch of dumbasses.”

“That’s….wow….it’s….”

“It’s going to fuck up my whole week is what it is. You think I’m meal prepping a brown rice and sweet potato bake with kale and cashew-tahini cream now? No fucking way dude. The next month of my life is all cases about this….and there’s a demon in my kitchen!”

“Sorry.” 

“It’s- well, it is your fault, but I’m not mad at you. Listen, brunch on Saturday is going to be one of the last time Sloane and I eat together that isn’t a ‘teambuilding culinary collab’ in a long time so I’m going to savor it, but after that you’re meeting us in the Jušić Street Houses and well, we’ll see what we can do about it.”

“You mean what Sloane can do about it? Is that….legal?”

“Not entirely.”

“Right.” he glanced at the time of his cell phone and then back at where Mia lay “Are you- my shift isn’t for a while but Enis, one of the residents, he’s an early riser and sometimes we watch the news together or he shows me these card tricks, so I can just- if you’re about to fall asleep I can, let you sleep or whatever.”

“No, you’re good.” she sat upright with a sigh “People here are just itching for the latest  drama now that what’s her name got kicked out. I wouldn’t want to sully your spotless sexual reputation with the implication that I’m in your bed for any reason other than my horrendous sleeping habits.”

“You make it sound like I’m some kind of celibate. I- I fuck.”

“Sure, but you also swear like a middle schooler that just heard the word ‘cunt’ for the first time and got excited about hanging out in an old folks home. That’s as squeaky clean as it gets, my guy. How you managed to wrong someone enough to get a demon is beyond me.”

Kit shrugged and watched her get up. It took only a step to cross from bed to doorway in his limited quarter, and she would have left then if he had not stopped her.

“You’re not going to ask?” 

“About what it is that’s weighing heavy in your heart and attracting things from the dark plane? Nah.” she shook her head “Why?”

“Dunno, I thought you might.” he said “That’s your job, isn’t it? Asking people why they are the way they are, either that or you have some other way of finding out.”

“It’s part of a necrologist’s job, yes, and I have plenty of ways.” she said “But you’re not my job, Kit. I’m not going to ask you questions you’re not ready to answer.”

“Oh. That’s….kind of you.”

“I guess so.” Mia looked at him, not fully in agreement and seeming like she was going to say something else but not doing so. Behind her the dim hallway lights became slightly brighter to indicate the sun approaching the horizon by a few more degrees.

“Good morning.” he said, looking up at them 

“I’m about to take my contacts out and wash my face before I fall asleep to the campiest b-movie I can find, it’s like the opposite of morning for me.”

“Well, goodnight then.”

“Yeah, laku noć.” she stepped out, no longer silhouetted in the doorway but lit by the hall as she slid his door half closed “See you around.”


	2. Branded Content™

Several hours after falling asleep to the mildly climactic conclusion of ‘Revenge of the Atomic Space Babes from Mars’ Mia was awoken by the sound of prerecorded birds; a feature of her Cube by Dwell™ which was assumably meant to make her feel like she was connected to nature and not spending a third of her monthly income to live inside a windowless box. She slapped her hand against the glowing screen beside her bed, stopping the alarm and letting the daily announcements play. Air pollution was down after the rain that was now moving out to sea. Former international teen pop sensation Jace Maverick was seen stepping out of the Granite District’s hottest club with an unidentified social media model. The safety blockades between Angluem and Marina following the St. Malo’s attack were now lifted completely and Metro service was running normally. Slicked back hair was officially out according to leading style influencers who were now sporting center parts. Rockefeller still did not have the coastal infrastructure needed to combat the ever rising waters and no viable solutions had been put forward by either the mortal government collective or the vampire queen herself. The daily quiz was one to determine which pastry matched your personality based off of your favorite 

“Sanja®️, off.” Mia said and the stream of notifications stopped

She rolled over in bed, picking up her phone from the unoccupied pillow beside her and hoping to find a message from her boss saying work would be stressful today and she could just camp out in a coffee shop if she wanted to. No such message lit up her screen. Her hopes dashed, Mia sat up, found her slippers, adjusted her shirt and shorts into something not disheveled with sleep, and pulled back the door that separated her Cube from the corridor. Two other women, Jeni the semi-professional foodie and Alyse who was as much a model as her boyfriend was a photographer, had their own doors open, each sitting in their beds and talking across the small distance of the hallway.

“Mia!” the latter said with the kind of cheery animatedness reserved for those who had already been awake for some time “Perfect timing! You know your way around the city, right?”

“Um, yeah, I guess so?” she said

“Of course you do! You’re totally an insider on the low; out every night with your side hustle, you must know the city so well by now. And you’re from here, right?”

“Not- I mean, I moved to Giry when I was eleven, but it was super suburban and also I was eleven so maybe I was raised in Rockefeller but I wasn’t born-”

“What’s the best secret spot you know?”

Mia’s brow creased. She knew the best spot to sneak into a patch of undeveloped and off limits land just east of where they stood now, she knew how to get onto the roofs of several buildings throughout the city and which spots were best for watching fireworks or sunrises or having sex, she knew a spot to buy every item of witchcraft legally avaible and a few items that weren’t, she knew the library where the city archives were kept, the best spot for burek and for fries and nearby the fry place she knew a spot that sold reproduction medival swords as a front for the unliscenced women-only gun range in it’s basement.

“Best spot for what?”

“Branded content.” she said, in a tone as if she was holding back a ‘duh’ sound from the end of the statement. “I’m doing an ad for BlissPure Detox Tea and I need some cute pics for the Feed. Three of them, actually.”

“Okay, right….” Mia nodded slowly and tried to think. 

As she stood in the corridor she could she the hazy shape of the demon, her eyes so focus on the spot the entity occupied that Alyse and Jeni both looked, though they saw nothing. In a city as dense as Rockefeller it was almost impossible for a mortal to go more than a few days without encountering a demon, but unless they suspected its presence or were outright alerted, most people simply did not see the entity that they were looking at. A demon could tether itself somewhere for years at a time and leave no more of an impression than giving mortals the anxious habit of looking over their shoulder as they sat with their back to an empty room.

“So? Do you know a spot?”

“Have you tried that Latte Del Rey that opened on the corner of Broad and Marangoz? It has a whole wall that’s basically floor to ceiling succulent plants.”

“In Vilkograd?” the young woman who was not being paid to post an advertisement for an herbal laxative on social media asked “I don’t know about geotagging in an enclave.”

“I’d hardly call it that.” Mia said “The Esthiru clan hasn’t had the kind of numbers for an enclave in decades and now with all the property developement around there, it’s all condos and shops pretty blatantly for mortals.”

“Well, I heard plants aren’t cute anymore.” Jeni said, pulling out her phone and tapping until she found a particular channel on the Feed “It’s all about being on the water now, see?”

The small screen now facing Mia displayed a stream of portraits, both of an editorial style and carefully posed shots passed off as candids, with the same visage in each. The subject was all pinched waist, satin hair, and poreless skin, sculpted cheekbones and an even more sculpted ass. She was so much the picture of perfection it would have been uncanny even without the way her eyes that caught light in their pupils. Her lips, plump and matte lipstick coated, were always rested in a coy pout of someone with the decorum not to show her teeth.

“Eris?” Mia scrolled through a smattering of late night poses on beaches and boats, even the images without them seemed to imply some kind of luxurious proximity “Vilkograd is too much of an enclave for you but you’re basing your aesthetic on Eris of the Vasilii clan?”

“Isn’t everyone? It’s about having the look not the lifestyle.” 

“Okay so….Eris’s look which is, for the record, inextricable from the fact that she is a vampire and she belongs to one of the five High Clans of Rockefeller, but at the same time not even in the proximity of where any vampires live.”

“Exactly!” Alyse said and turned to her friend “I told you she would know a place.”

Mia sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose “Alright, uh boats. Okay. So, you’re going to want to go to this place called the Velvet Revival in Trokut, 83rd street just south of Olmsted Parkway, ask for Derry. He’s going to sound like he’s hitting on you but he’s not, that’s just the way he talks. Tell him Mia sent you and also give him some money to buy minutes on his phone so he can talk to his Uncle Ray Ray.”

“Who?”

“Ray Ray runs mini yachts up the harbor to Dominie’s north cove three nights a week. He will also sound like he’s hitting on you and that’s because he is. Tell him I sent you and he’ll knock it off. He might also ask if you’re really there for a photoshoot and even when you say yes he’s still going to suspect I sent you for his other eye, don’t worry about that.”

“What happen to his first eye?”

“I said don’t worry about it but if you do, know that it’s his own fault for lying to me.”

“Mia, what the fuck.”

“Or, alternatively, there still is Latte Del Rey.”

Alysa frowned and considered this for a moment “This Ray guy isn’t a creep or anything, right? Because Trace does keto now and he’s building a lot of lean muscle.”

“Please don’t let you boyfriend beat up a guy with one eye and no insurance. Honestly I think he’s just looking for validation. His wife was his high school sweetheart and I don’t think he’s been feeling too good about himself since she,” Mia pointed two fingers to the roof of her mouth and dropped her thumb like a hammer “you know.”

The two young women shared a wide eyed look and then turned back to Mia with the most pleasant false smiles they could muster “Our condolences for his loss.”

“Yeah, it was rough. Sort destroyed him on a spiritual level.” she nodded, thinking about the year the man had had “Anyway, I was just on my way to wash my face. I’ll tell Derry to expect you if I run into him first and uh, good luck.”

“Thanks.”

The two women continued their agreeable expressions, no doubt dropping them the moment Mia walked past. She was not yet out of earshot when she heard the faint ringing that was said to happen when one became the subject of gossip.

  
  


A hour later a faded black baseball cap, the embroidery frayed to the point of illegibility, kept the afternoon sun out of Mia’s eyes while the same rays baked freckles onto her bare shoulders. She had stepped out of Dwell™ and it’s concrete construction surrounding onto the streets of a daylit Little Serbia, which was in a way a completely different place than through which she had walked just hours prior.

At night the sidewalks under the elevated Metro tracks would be lined with folding tables that were spread with knock-off makeup, copied dvds, fake jewelry, and anything that could turn a profit. If one’s gaze lingered too long on a table the sellers would descend, all flashing eyes and quick words as they tried to make a sale before the permit officers came by for the night. Some had given up on unlawful commercers all together, and could be found at the foot of the steps up to the platform, hands out to gather enough changed to make it though the turnstile. There were shelters that provided a dark place to spend the day and a scant cup of blood but they filled up quickly and could turn an undead out into the midday sun if they were causing too much trouble. It was safer for chronically penniless vampire to take the Metro into Angulem and ride along the network of underground tracks until it was dark enough for them to emerge again. There were some so destitute they had stopped coming above ground at all. 

Now, at quarter past two in the early months of the summer, Little Serbia belonged to the living. Mothers sat on stoops of the houses that lined one way streets, catching what breeze they could and watching the children that had neither school nor the funds for day camp. Mortal men with their shirts tied up over sweat sheened abs played basketball in the same overflow lot behind the grocery store that Mia cut through to get to the Metro. A roštilj that had been in the neighborhood for nearly two decades now had put out a ‘save our shop’ sign as recently built condos were threatening to change the zoning laws of the block. Mia debated for a moment whether to stop in and see if they had any bosanska kafa on, or if she should go to one of the dozen Cargo Houses near her office, something she had been doing with far more frequency since she had won a CH Rewards card in a work raffled that spring.

Her thermos still empty in her sling bag, Mia made her way up the platform and caught a train she would have missed if she had stopped to fill her vacuum flask at the grill. As it lurched into motion again she steadied herself with a hip against the ‘do not lean on doors’ sticker and a shoulder to the window. The train had come from somewhere deep in Marina, it’s seats filling slowly on its way to a transfer stop in a neighborhood called Trokut, bodies moved on and off the bench lined metal car and then with it as it pulled out of the station. Continuing on, it had met up with Mia in Little Serbia, it’s path dipping down to just graze Cinder Hill before passing through Vilkograd on it’s way to cross the Broad St Bridge. The river below, one of the estuaries that made Marina and Angulem and Giry all islands in Rockefeller, was named after some long-dead cartographer, but ever since the city had lined it’s natural shores with retain walls for the purpose of real estate development and flood prevention it had been known by almost all citizens as the Concrete River. Over the water and into Angulem, the tracks went underground, as all tracks did on the central island. The stops here were lit only by artificial light, it’s intensity never changing, and leaving the vampires that had retreated to use the waxing and waning of commuters as their way to count the days.

Having passed under Eastside, Mia’s train came to the Zimmerman Park Station in Lobo, and she made her way with a handful of others onto the limescale dotted platform. This had been her routine five day a week for a few years now, done so methodically that she had been entirely lost in her own thoughts until a voice behind her pointed out that there was an entire demonstration going on in the public square they had ascended into.

“Oh! What’s happening?” the woman’s tone was colored with concern “Is this a protest?”

“It’s those….Rights Matter folks, isn’t it?”

“No Dad,” a younger voice than the first two answered “You know there’s more than one social activism movement.”

“We already gave them their rights.” the man continued over the sound of his daughter sighing. The family of three trailed close behind Mia, the elder pair almost dependant on the path that she was cutting through the milling crowd. “You’re too young to remember what it was like before the Integration, but believe you me girlie, there was a time when they really didn’t have any rights. There were no bleeding hearts holding signs back when I was your age. Now everyone’s ‘oppressed’, you know what we used to call oppression? The school of hard knocks. If one of these vampires even looked at a living person funny in our town the boys would round him up and keep him out until dawn just to give him a little scare, and that’s the way it was. Taught ‘em a lesson. Can’t do that anymore, can you, Barb, remember? Rights Matter? Bloodsuckers have more rights than the living now.”

“Dad! You can’t call them that!”

“What? I don’t mean it like that! They suck blood! I can’t say they suck blood anymore? See, this is what I’m talking about. You given them equal rights and then the PC police have you scared to even say what’s true.”

“Your father’s right, Keysee.” the woman named Barb said in the almost exasperated tone of a woman who has stopped disagreeing with her husband years ago

“Mom! I just want to get back to my dorm, okay?”

“Is this what it’s like down here? All these, what’s you call them….socialist actives….”

The conversation faded out of earshot as the family veered off in the direction of the Rockefeller University resident hall that housed students during summer semester. If the girl named Keysee was a freshman she would have been three or four when a series of laws collectively known as the Integration had swept across the nation of Unified Laurentia, an age that precluded her from memories of a time when passing between lokaliteti meant not only changing legislation on wether or not upir lyssavirus was considered a disease to be cured but if those inhabited by it retained their personhood after their heart no long beat without the assistance of the microscopic parasite more often known colloquially as the bane. The story of a vampire with wandering eyes being harassed until the UV radiation began to damage his fragile skin may have sounded overly cruel to the student, but Mia, who had been eleven that year, knew that these were the actions of men in a kinder town that some others she knew. 

The final stretch of Mia’s commute was a two block walk out of Zimmerman Square and to a nondescript mixed-use building of shining glass. What had started in a rented Cube where she was free to smoke a bowl in her underwear and eat Eurocrem with a spoon now ended a small cluster of standing desks that Mia’s boss rented from the open plan shared office company WorkSpace™. The desks were officially called ‘ergonomic creation center’ and an internal meeting had described the commercial real estate giant’s LoBo location as a fun and vibrant space-share opportunity that was disrupting stale office culture from the ground up with self-directed, collaborative, flexible ‘doer’ culture. They had a gluten free salad bar and rooftop yoga when the weather permitted. Mia hooked the strap of her sling bag onto the corner of her desk and took a moment to consider the swath of all weather fabric that was strung between the nearby window frame and a column. 

“Hey Sloane….uh, where’d you get a hammock?”

A head of dark hair and round wire rimmed glasses peaked out from over the edge of where she and her laptop were suspended a few feet above the floor. “Where does anyone get a hammock?”

“The biohacker bros over at urbn trek's cluster?” she asked and her friend turned coworker nodded “What were you doing over there?”

“Procrastinating.”

“At what cost?”

They both glanced in the direction of where Zack, Zach, Zak, and Brayler practiced polyphasic sleep between writing code for an app that showed its users walking routes that avoided ‘socioeconomically dissonant’ sections of the city. As they looked, one of the young men reach down towards another’s crotch, flicking him so suddenly and forcefully that his body did not know whether to jump or double over, and decided to do a mix of both. The other two roared with laughter as if abrupt testicular pain was the height of comedy. 

“Am I proud of myself for befriending them? No.” Sloane said “Did I get a hammock out of it? Fuck yeah I did.”

“You made a deal with devils.”

“I’m not the one with an actual demon in my apartment.”

“Ugh, don’t remind me.” Mia said, unscrewing the top of her thermos and taking a sip of the over-roasted Cargo House coffee that she had developed a taste for. She looked back at four desks claimed by the founder and employees of the Docton Agency for Necrological Archivery, none of which were particularly in use at the moment “Mads is down at St. Malo’s?”

“Brint too.” Sloane said of DANA’s perpetual intern “They’re getting the inside scoop before assigning us cases on it.”

“I don’t want another caaaase.” she whined “I have to finish my piece on the Pridvor and Dalibor clans’ territorial dispute in Novi Nada.”

“Why? I know you love defending every disadvantaged, mischaracterized, and generally shit upon vampire in Rockefeller, but that thing is going straight to the tomes when you publish and you’ll straight up remain the only one out of the handful of people have become Senior Necrologist before they were twenty five who isn’t a recognizable name. What’s the point of all those certifications and accolades if the only people that read your cases are dusty old scholars?”

“Another piece on how the LDF is conditioning angry young men on the internet to believe that the reason they’re virgins is because of women and vampires, and that instead of self-improvement they should just become domestic terrorists, isn’t how I’m going to make a name for myself either.”

“You gotta interview a royal.” Sloane said, hoping down from the hammock

“Of course, I’ll be sure to get right on that.” she rolled her eyes “I’ll see if Lord Aurelius can pencil me in some time.”

“Nah, fuck Lord Aurelius. Mads and I were talking about this this morning, you need to interview nasljednik.”

At this Mia outright laughed “Yeah, I need that like I need student loan forgiveness and the ability to form romantic relationships were both people aren’t worse off by the end of it than they were when it started. Which is to say I need it a whole lot.”

“Speaking of treacherous romantic endeavors, I need to borrow your dagger.”

“Yeah? Did your last date go so embarrassingly pooly that you’re just going to stab the girl to save face or something?”

“Šuti. I need it for magic. Sexy lesbian magic.” Sloane said “We’ve been on three dates now and thing are going at breakneck speed and I need some sacred silver for an incantation that will reveal the Threads of Fate to me before I tell her I’m a vještica and also that I show my butthole to strangers on the internet for money.”

“Don’t the Threads only- oh fuck!” Mia ducked suddenly, dropping into a crouch as a red rubber ball passed through the space that had been occupied by her ribcage seconds prior. It sailed over from the desks of a dating startup that used aggregated information from your online restaurant reviews to suggest potential romantic partners, over the sunken seating pit for collaborative brainstorming, and by way of DANA’s cluster of desks, made contact with a designer of novelty suspenders for small to medium sized dog.

A young woman with a fashionably loose fishtail braid looked at the ball and then up at the Innovation Board in the center of WorkSpace™. The full length chalkboard wall displayed the most ‘disruptive idea’ of anyone hit with the alternatively purposed sports equipment. Sixty something desk-renters fell silent waiting for her answer.

“Um….um….a vegan bath bomb subscription service….customized to your sun, moon, and rising sign….with biodegradable glitter and CBD oil?”

A woman in a sheath dress that looked too much like a pillowcase to have cost a day’s wages nodded and wrote this down. Mia and Sloane shared a look and then watched as the bouncing office-wide plague went back up into the air to seek it’s next target. One of the other designers of novelty dog suspenders was looking over at the pair of necrologists, taken aback by the sort of urgency of Mia’s reflexes when she had only been avoiding a mildly inconvenient element of WorkSpace™ culture. She was back upright now, but the eyes stayed on her, and Mia had no interest in being the subject of novelty. As the ball made its way back past the VR equipped conference rooms, she turned to her desk and got to work on translating the original text of the grant with which Bijeli Kralj had gifted the neighborhoods that would become known as Middling and Novi Nada in the annexed port city that would become Rockefeller. 

As notable as the past eighteen hours had been, Mia’s next few became notable only in how unremarkable they were. She had a handful of active cases each with research to be done and interviews to be requested and if they were going to generate any traffic and ad revenue they needed flashy images and the kind of title that got clicks, neither of which she felt she had any particular knack for. A pair of headphones, which needed to be plugged in at a certain angle to work, sat over Mia’s ears as she listened to the kind of pop culture commentary podcast that she wouldn’t have touched if her friend Dušan wasn’t the cohost. It was playing low as she poured over texts of the undead, pausing only to add citations and the occasional footnote to the document she was composing.

“Working hard or hardly working?

She glanced down from her screen as the sound of rolling chair wheels on polished concrete flooring stopped beside her. Locke the roving tech assistant had wheeled his way over to the DANA employees with the sort of intentional look of someone who had already decided he was going to have a conversation. Mia motioned to her headphones and shrugged.

“Can’t hear you.”

“Just take them-” he stood up from his chair and reach towards her “Take them off.”

Mia recoiled but lowered them to her neck, rathering a conversation than being touched by someone she didn’t even particularly like “What’s up?”

“Nothing much, just chilling, you?”

“Uh, working.”

“Nice, nice. The Feed’s pretty crazy today, isn’t it?” he leaned onto her desk and touched the acrylic cup where she kept her pens “Well, my Feed is. I like to use social media for keeping up with current events.”

“You’ve liked every picture I’ve ever posted where my belly button is visible. I’d hardly call my navel a current event, it’s sort of been there for a while.”

“Well,” Locke defended himself “you….do show a lot of skin in your pictures.”

“Yeah, that’s because most of my body is covered in it.”

“Seems to me that you want guys to like your pictures.”

Mia gasped “Are you implying I use social media for attention? For validation? Light Above, you must be some kind scholar, a psychic! How can you see into my eyes like open doors? You have revealed my deepest secret, under my standoffish exterior all I really want is for people to look at me and tell me I’m pretty.”

“So you are trying to bait guys for likes!” he said, his voice rising as if he had just caught the entire female gender in a lie and was about to expose them.

“Lake, I don’t have time to discuss the nuances of female self esteem in the digital age.”

“Locke.” he corrected her

“Okay, well, I’m getting back to work now, Locke,” she returned her headphones to her ears “Some of us actually have things to do because we didn’t get hired because a guy from our fraternity’s dad owns WorkSpace™.”

Locke said something in response but it was rendered indistinguishable the moment Mia had switched her audio from podcast to the DIY indie-rock and contralto vocals of a woman singing about how she would turn into space gas if she didn’t have a name. The tech assistant mutter a final bit of unflattering presumption and then rolled away, off to initiate some other conversation with a woman who was in the middle of doing her job.

“Hate that guy.” Sloane said over the screen of her monitor

“Same.” Mia responded “He can eat shit.” 

With their mutual dislike of Locke affirmed the two women fell back into the silence of their work. Another hour passed, the shadows of buildings shifted across LoBo and the necrologists shifted at their standing desks, occasionally walking away to eat free office snacks in the Smart Lounge. When they had had their fill of non-gmo cassava chips and organic goji berries they wandered back. 

“You know,” Sloane said as the clocks rapidly approached six pm “A good employee would stay late so they can be here when Mads gets back and assigns us new cases.”

“So you’re heading out?”

“Yep.” she hoisted a heavy purse up on her shoulder and started scrolling through her phone as she spoke “Jasna got a coupon for martinis and massages. I would have invited you but I know you like getting your hours in on second shift almost as much as you would hate having to pretend to relax while a stranger touching your whole bod-…. Hold on.”

“Hmm.”

Sloane held up one hand and then used the other to scan her finger on the small machine they used to punch in and out “Okay, I’m off the clock. Look at the Feed and tell me I’m not fucking hallucinating right now.”

Mia opened a new tab on her computer while Sloane read over what she was already seeing with a crease in her brow. A streamlined interface that every tech start up hoped to emulate displayed an endless stream of posts from various users and corporate brands acting like they were people “What am I looking for? Who’s channel am I supposed to be looking at?”

“Your crush.”

Mia rolled her eyes and started typing @_nasljednik, having only gotten three characters in when her history offered the icon and display name of the often visited feed. The face in the small circular portrait was half obscured by a hand that was holding up a peace sign, though the gesture was somewhat negated by a tattoo reading ‘jebi se’ running down the length of his middle finger. Behind it, the lips of the users were pulled up in a self assured sneer, revealing a mouth of gold and pointed vampiric teeth. He was Queen Ivana’s sole protégé and the heir apparent to the throne of Rockefeller, but had changed his display name to what the tabloids had taken to calling him, The Brat Prince.

The pinned post remained as it had been for months now, a simple statement of ‘leave me alone’, but the out of focus photos and stream of conscious snippets from a young royal with a social media account that had also sat unchanged were slightly off now. They were bumped down by a new post that had been made ninety seconds ago.

 

@LDFofRoc miss me with that bullshit.

 

“Did he just-” Mia said softly

“What a shocking turn of events that I’ll have to think about next time I clock in.”

If she had not already been standing Mia would have gotten up from her seat, instead she leaned her weight against the same column that supported the hammock and held the sides of her face “They’re going to kill him.”

“Even the LDF isn’t crazy enough to call for a hit on a royal.”

“Oh, no, I’m talking about his clan. Boldizsár’s one job as steward is to keep Prince Stoney in line and not letting him fucking, go on the Feed and antagonize Rockefeller’s biggest and most violent ult-nat group.”

“I’m sure Boldizsár’s gotten used to not being listened to by now.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Mia said and reread the post “So much for the Veceslav-Bozhena’s whole Strength in Silence thing. You know, as much as one of their supporters attacking an empty building made the LDF look like a bunch of hapless idiots, at least some of the royal clan’s PR could’ve pass it off as like, just a thing that happened to happen and not something the anyone would have grounds to retaliate for.”

“Until the Brat Prince so much as said that he moved the refugees and that the LDF can go suck a fat one.” Sloane raised her eyebrows in a ‘yikes’ motion and slipped her phone into her purse “Much to think about for those who are still on the clock.”

“Sloane.”

“Hope you’re happy with what you got done on that case about the land dispute between the Dalibor and Pridvor because hmm, let me check, who at DANA writes about the Brat Prince like, all the time? Oh right it’s you. Hey, listen, on the bright side, at least you know what Mads is going to assign you for your new case, right?”

“Sloane, don’t you dare leave me here like this.”

“It’s Friday, I’m getting a massage.” she threw her hands up and backing away from her desk “The wheels are already in motion, it’s beyond my control.”

“I hope you fart during it!”

“Fine, I hope Nevenka Hathorne vague posts some nasty bullshit and it makes you crazy because you’re also obsessed with her.”

“I’m serious, the nastiest fart you’ve ever had, a devastating quality of flatulence.”

“Sorry you’re jealous of my soon to be relaxed muscles!” she gave Mia one last shrug before turning a corner to the elevator bank “Bye biiitch!”

“Love you too!”

“See you at Ljiljana’s!”

“Bye!”


	3. An Exorcism after Brunch

“She was all like ‘you’re my best necrologist, Mia, I trust you’ll see this case through to its fullest conclusion’ and I’m like aaaaahhhhhhh! What conclusion! You told me to interview a vampire that hasn’t been interviewed in five years! There’s an active story with the Dalibor case that needs to be archived in the tomes! I need to focus on that! I have like, a bunch of interviews for that case! Not to mention everything else I’m working on. Anything I write about the Brat Prince is just going to be another stupid fluff piece without an interview because he literally doesn’t give interviews!”

“You forgot ‘lowkey horny’, it’s going to be a lowkey stupid horny fluff piece.” 

“I’d argue everything Mia writes about the Brat is highkey horny.” 

“I’m going to attack both of you like a feral animal.”

“And yet you’re not denying it.”

“Of course she’s not denying it, it’s true.”

“Šuti.” Mia rolled her eyes and took a hit from her friend’s oil pen. Brunch had given way to an afternoon exorcism for Sloane and Kit, but for Mia, Jasna, and Ela, it had transitioned into the usual; getting high on the empty bleachers of some housing block’s community sports field. The clouds and the air quality were both perhaps a bit too low to be lounging around like they were, but the concrete apartment complex was actually the best place for Ela to cough her lungs out. The noise was almost imperceptible over the sound of colicky babies and the thumping base of young men that fancied themselves musicians. 

There was a smell to these clusters of high-rise housing as well. Five hundred people all cooking and saging and piling up their garbage did well to cover up the smell of the small fire Sloane had started midfield. Mia could hardly tell that Kit’s most favored earthly possession was being sacrificed as she lay back against the cool metal bench of the bleacher.

“You good?” Ela asked, looking over her shoulder

“Mm. Yeah. Just thinking.”

Apartments rose up on all sides of them, their tops turning the sky above into a square grey-blue box. If she looked up at the lazily moving clouds, focused on the slowness of her own breath, and kept her hands folded where they were on her lowest ribs, she would have no problem with the fact that a demon was being exorcised from the earthly plane just beyond the edge of her vision. Too many years had passed and too many things had changed for Mia to remember everything Dr. Cole had taught them, but his voice hadn’t left her. She could image him saying the words she was thinking. Sloane had an extraordinary ability to influence the external world, but it was Mia’s ability affect her own internal world.

A ripple that none of them could see radiated suddenly out from the center of the pitch. Kit breathed the sigh of relief at the lightening of a weight he had not realized he was carrying, while Sloane laughed and shook away the lightheaded feeling from a great exertion of force. Far enough away that they had not been part it, both Jasna and Ela found themselves scowling for a moment as something passed them by but left no lingering feeling. Mia was not so unscathed though. Her breath went with what passed, like a punch in the gut that curled her body around where the blow had made contact.

“Hey, are you go-” Jasna had started to ask, though did not need to finish her question as it was answered as soon as Mia turned her head sideways and vomited through bleacher risers onto the ground below.

“Ah fuck.” she coughed to clean her throat and spat. “Am I good? Is that what you were going to say? I mean I’m better now, but good is relative.”

“Yeah, wow, Medo’s bloody marys were so good you had to taste them twice?”

“Guess so.” 

“Lightweight.”

“Wino.” she laughed despite the lingering tomato juice and bile in her mouth. She still felt vaguely breathless, but dumping her half digested brunch through the slats of bleacher seat had done much to alleviate her discomfort. As she sat up the two that had missed the initial incident started making their way up from the pitch with some dedication.

“What happened?” Kit hurried up the steps faster than Sloane, his hands up as if he had decided he was going to help before before knowing what there was to help.

“I’m fine, I’m fine! I puked, no big deal.”

“Are you alright?”

“Yeah, just like-” there was distance between them but Mia motioned for the gap to widen, Kit stepping back onto a lower riser when she did so.

“Right, no smothering.” he said “I am as present as you need me to be but also as distant as you need me to be.”

“Hvala, I appreciate it.” she said, with a slight laugh “So, um, how was the exorcism?”

“Fine. Yeah. Having to swear off butter biscuits and burn a box of them like an effigy was the well, not the hardest part, but the most demanding I’d say….odd too.”

“That’s magic baybee.” Sloane said “You could probably get away with a cookie here and there if you really wanted to. Of course indulging in your favorite earthly possession will undo my neat little job of wrapping you up oh so nicely in a blanket of Divine Light and Goodness, but that demon was so loosely tethered to you we could make this a regular thing?”

“Could we?” he asked, looking up from the canvas shoulder bag he was rummaging in

“Mm, it would scar your soul, but we could.”

“I don’t like the sound of that.” he wrinkled his nose and then a moment later made a small exclamation of discovery, having found the still slightly cold water bottle he had packed earlier that morning. He set it on the metal bench and slid the container towards Mia in his best effort to be helpful without overwhelming her.

“It’s fine.” Sloane waved it off as she picked up the oil pen and clicked it up to it’s highest setting “Everyone’s soul is a little worse for wear by the end of things; if they only let clean ones into Paradise we’d all end up in the Pit. But enough of that boring shit, what hot goss did I miss while I was lighting half my herb kit on fire.”

“The usual.” Jasna said “El’s dad thinks he can still tell her how to live her life, I’m this close to quitting another job, Mia’s pretending she doesn’t want to spend the next couple weeks working on a case about her crush even though she totally does.” 

“No, no.” Mia said “What I don’t want to do is spend the next couple weeks writing a stupid fluff piece that’s just a list of what scant information we all already have about the Brat. That’s what the Order does. And as far as fluff goes, PopPress is out there writing a whole article every time he stumbles out of some model’s mansion with his pants still unzipped.”

“And you’re out there like ‘gods, I wish that was me’.”

“Hey, look, I got something for you,” Mia bent four fingers in to display only the middlemost one to her friends “It’s right here.”

“Aw thanks, how thoughtful, is that the finger you want to put up the Prince’s butt?”

“I actually don’t know enough about ass fingering to have a comeback to that. Sloane, you just got ban from the Feed for another thirty days for showing your buttholes to strangers. That must make you some kind of expert, right?”

“I got ban for charging strangers to be shown my butthole.” she clarified “The Feed has a strict policy about e-commerce, less strict about nudity, extremely not strict about me making a whole bunch of different accounts, which is what I did.”

“Good.” Ela said “The Feed can’t join-or-die every streaming platform and then ban camgirls, they’re the backbone of the internet. Also, is Lord Aurelius a prince? Because if I had to slip a royal a finger, and it was him….I wouldn’t be mad at it.”

“No he’s a lord.”

“Oh. Duh.” she laughed “Still, if I had the choice.”

Jasna took her oil pen back, took a last hit before the cartridge was too spent to be useful, and tucked it into her bag “See, Mi, that’s what I’m saying. There’s a clear winner if you’re going to have a crush on some tousled-haired blue-eyed royal. Lord Aurelius is distinguished, well loved, handsome and cultured. Prince Stoney is….what did he get called, uh, a roadside attraction that crawled out of a rotting grease trap?”

“A prosaic peacock that crawled out of a putrified grease trap.” 

“Uh, half assed alliteration is so cheap.”

“The entire piece is cheap.” Mia said “Roko LeBlanc, who thinks he’s a real journalist because he occasionally takes a break from gossip blogging to write an op ed for the Weekly, likened the Prince to a ‘roadside attraction more novelty than substance’, and ‘a shoddily made gas station souvenir whose garish existence is an affront to the majesty that spawned it’ then later in the article called his tattoos bad and that he ‘looks as much like a public bathroom stall as he is bound to smell’ and closed the piece out posing the oh so original and thought provoking question why Rockefeller continues to acknowledge a ceremonial monarch when nasljednik is a ‘lumbering tinsel-coated peacock who by all accounts crawled out of the sludge a putrified grease trap and stumbled onto the highest throne of our city’.”

“The fact that you can just pull quotes from an article you’ve hate-read, is-”

“I hate-read it because LeBlanc is actively a bad writer and should stay in his lane and let the necrologists take care of writing about the undead.”

“Sure. That’s the qualm you have with him.”

“It is. It’s not my business if people shit talk the Prince.”

“You blocked my old roommate on the Feed cause she posted a joke about a meatball that rolled under her fridge and grew mold becoming the heir to the throne of Rockefeller.”

“Well it was a tired joke and also I should have blocked her when she moved to Tavaci without telling you and stole your mattress for some weird reason.”

“Yeah that was….confounding.” Jasna’s brow furrowed for a moment as if she was once again trying to work out why she had come home one day last year to find her sheets balled up beside her box spring “You know what else is confounding? Your need to defend the Brat Prince like he’s not a grown man who can handle his own shit.”

“Would you say he’s a grown man who can handle his own shit?” Sloane looked skeptical as she spoke “Mia is DANA’s resident expert on the Royal Clan but I, personally, wouldn’t use the words ‘grown’ or ‘can handle shit’ to describe nasljednik.”

“Yeah, Some of that scant information we have about him is his age of death, and twenty one is peak dumb boy age.”

“So, that was like six years ago.”

Mia shook her head “Doesn’t matter. The bane, whatever you think it is or where ever you think it came from, is surprisingly not that complex. Sure it can raise the dead, but if someone dies without the wherewithal to deal with something like say, every media outlet in Rockefeller calling him the worst thing to happen to the monarchy since Bijeli Kralj left and criticizing his every public move, he can’t just form a new neural pathway about it. Ageless is ageless all over. Early twenties is all he gets.”

“Užasno Djeca.” Sloane said “Means terrible children, it’s an old term from before there were laws against turning minors.”

“Right. Imagine amassing decades and decades of knowledge but never being able to process it like you’re fully grown. I mean,” she paused and looked around the empty pitch “the Queen? A thousand years of knowledge but the emotional maturity of a high schooler. Honestly it’s no wonder she’s….you know….”

“A paranoid, religious recluse that refused to proginate an heir apparent for almost two centuries and then out of the blue turned some random twenty something that clearly wasn’t raised u tradiciji and judging by his accent isn’t even from Rockefeller?”

“Yeah, that.”

“So,” Ela said “To summarize, the Brat Prince is an eternal twenty one year old with an absentee maternal figure and a dick-first attitude towards anyone pretty enough to make a career out of it, and you….don’t know how you’re getting this story?”

“I’m not going to fuck him for the story”

“I respect that, I really do, but alternatively….you could fuck him for the story.”

“Unless I’m also going to sleep with Lux, who unfortunately is not within the gender confines of the kind of individuals I find compelling to sleep with, I don’t think your plan is as foolproof as you seem to think it is.”

“Foolproof? As in waterproof but for fools instead of water? I would never make a foolproof plan for you, a fool.” she said to a chuckle from a seat further down the bleacher

“Šuti.” she leaned over to hit Kit on the arm “Remember just now how I facilitated the exorcism of your demon? You’re indebted. Be on my side.”

“Fine.” he said “Who’s this Lux character?”

“Officially? She’s no one. The Veceslav-Bozhena clan doesn’t recognize the Berlinghiero clan, old vampire politics, pre-war shit.” Mia waved a hand to indicate that she was refraining for the boring details “In Rockefeller she has no title, no territory, no standing whatsoever, but as far as anyone can tell she’s been by the Brat Prince from the beginning. When he left the city he could’ve taken his whole court, and should have at least taken his steward, Boldizsár, but he didn’t. He took a couple mortals, his dog, and Lux. Anything anyone want with him goes through her first.”

“I’d fuck her.” Sloane said, having already pulled up the photostream of Lux’s account on the Feed. She turned her phone screen towards Kit, who exhale through pursed lips and then nodded in agreement.

“Okay, well, short of fangbanging our way into the Brat’s inner circle, I don’t have any actual plan for what to do after I really do prove myself a fool by scheduling and showing up to a meeting with Boldizsár next week.”

“What’s foolish about that?”

“Everything. Boldizsár is an old guard dick that, despite his many disagreements with his charge, does share the Prince’s opinion of not liking necrologists.”

“Hmm, unfortunate, since you’re a necrologist.” Jasna said

“Yeah. Boy moved all the way to Black Dirt just to get away from us.”

Kit looked thoughtful for a moment “That’s where you’re from, Black Dirt. Surely you and he have some kind of….cultural geographic camaraderie now that he lives in the same place where you grew up.”

“Oh, he doesn’t live where I grew up. The part of Black Dirt I’m from doesn’t have vampires. It doesn’t even have mortals anymore.” she said, and then clapped her hands on her knees before standing up suddenly “C’mon, we should get Sloane’s magical refuse cleaned and get going because, if we are going to think of a plan, it’s not going to be while I’m sitting several feet above my owns drying vomit.”


	4. The Ordainment of Prince Stoney

For a number of reasons ranging from needless teenaged rebellion to the dissolving of a small libertarian government, Mia had not lived a life with an excess of consistency. There was one thing though had become something of a habit, and that was that in all her years, Mia had never really learned a lesson the first time. Five days after the attack on St. Malo’s she was in Dva Mosta again, her Drop™ delivery radius set around the central forum and her voice recorder charged in case she wanted to take any verbal notes on the condition of the cathedral. 

The blood business was not lucrative in Lower Angulem; most undead that could afford to make their home south of Old Granica Street could also afford not to rely on a delivery service for their hematic sustenance. Most were Common Era, still the largest vampire demographic a decade and a half on, and one that was known to prefer the personal relationship of concomitants over the seeming impersonalness of an app. The fact that Drop™ had been heavily funded by the post-Integration Brat Prince did not help win their favor either.

 Her last delivery before dawn had taken Mia to Dva Mosta’s waterfront and the kind of anachronistically low-rise apartment building that no one had moved in and out of for at least half a century. The vampire inside had ordered an entire pint despite residing within walking distance of Biser Street Blood Bank and kept the chain locked when he inched his door open. After confirming that the one answering the door was the vampire who had decided he would call himself Haze for the eternity after he had shed his mortal name, Mia handed the pint through the opening and was met with the feeling of tepid fingers on the inside of her forearm. Reflexes quicker than her own kept her from pulling away as Haze the vampire held her by the wrist and inquired about the small astronomical symbol tattooed below her pushed up sleeve.

“Do you take pleasure in pain of the flesh?” he cooed 

“Ew, fuck off.”

She dropped the pint and let it clatter to the ground. Biser Street Blood Bank had made the switch from glass flasks to recycled metal ones that did not shatter when dropped onto parquet wood floors. The vampire stepped back, startled.

“Careful, djevojka.” he said a moment later, showing her the screen of a cellphone and the interface where she had not yet been rated on a five-star scale.

“Oh, we’re doing it like that?” she took out her own phone and faced it to him as she tapped to give him a single star with a wide smile “Thanks for choosing Drop™! Jedi govna!”

The door closed and Mia did not stick around to find out if it would open again when the chain lock was undone. She hurried down the three flights of stairs, pulled the sleeve of her windbreaker over the stick-n-poke venus symbol she had gotten from the drummer of a pop-punk band while they were drinking wine coolers in his community college dorm room, and pushed open the building doors to step out into the night air again. 

With the app still up on her phone, the necrologist who moonlighted as a delivery girl switched off her availability for the night. A push notification told her that a small sum of money had been transferred to her bank; the vampire could give her any star rating he wanted, but he paid for his blood no matter what. Tomorrow night she would set up her delivery radius in Marina and do her usual route around Little Serbia and Vilkograd, collecting the kind of easy money that would hopefully leave her enough to justify spending it on the latest installment of the Rub Univerzuma franchise. In the month and a half since RU: Beyond Oblivion had come out, Mia had watched every video game journalist and self-appointed critic discuss game mechanics and expanded lore while she eyed the paper print out that she had tacked to her corkboard and which displayed how much she still owed in student loans.

She was thinking of the fact that the Pariah System was now a playable world as she wandered back towards the central plaza of Dva Mosta. Beneath the public square was a nexus of a Metro station where several train lines, including the one that would take her home, connected. Mia’s steps took her past the underground entrance though, and instead she wanted towards the center of the plaza. An hour ago she had watched well moneyed vampires with long jacket and avoidant glances disappear into doorways, in another hour the neighborhoods of Lower Angulem would be populated by mortals dressed in business suits or the comfortable shoes of tourists, but on the cusp of twilight there was nothing but the brief and quiet emptiness where Mia could almost convince herself she was alone in a city of eight million.

Something moved across the avenue furthest from her, where green boards blocked off some in progress public works project, and she squinted to see that she was not the only living soul in the plaza. Her distant compatriot was dressed in a dark hoodie and cargo pants that would have given away their social standing even if they weren’t finishing up the last sprays of their stencil graffiti. When the bandana clad artist stepped away Mia took a moment to admire the piece. It was a bit on the nose for her taste; two bodies occupied a bed, one belonging to the dough-soft face of bigoted podcast host turned ult-nat political candidate and the other to the anthropomorphized logo of the LDF. The implication that Briet was in bed with Rockefeller’s most noted anti-vampire hate group was already old news when they had officially endorsed his mayoral campaign, but money, connections, and a cult-like base of fans had somehow insulated the man from any truly damning ties to the people who had tried to burn the cathedral that rose up at Mia’s back.

She shared a look with the graffitist and then let the moment pass as quickly as it had come, neither were here for camaraderie, anonymous or otherwise. What she was looking for from St. Malo’s Mia wasn’t quiet sure, but if she could get a cellphone shot of the smoke stained rectory it would make the trespassing worth it. The toe of her boot found purchase in the fence around the side of the building. The earth that her feet landed on was not holy, it was not even consecrated, but just as basilicas had gone from public courts to places of worship, the undead had turned the grand buildings that seemed to be made up of infinite gilded domes into their clan meeting houses. 

Mia had been in St. Malo’s of the Royal Clan of Veceslav-Bozhena exactly once, not counting this or any other time she had scaled the fence to slink around the cathedral grounds. She had been twenty years old, with a need to go to Business Math for Non-Majors and a need to eat something, but skipping both for the news that was coming out of Dva Mosta. Rockefeller’s second vampire monarch, the ancient and heirless queen, was no longer heirless. It had been thought that when Queen Ivana’s reign ended the throne would pass to her proginator’s second turned, just as a mortal queen could be succeed by a younger sibling if she were to be childless, but the announcement of a progeny had thrown the royal lineage into uncertainty. Amidst this, Mia had been studying Sempiternal Historiography, which was a fancy way of saying that she was training to be a scholar of the tomes and that her extracurricular excursions would be more beneficial if they were to the dusty archives of city hall and not to join the small crowd of miscellaneous devotees and necrologists in the forum outside of St. Malo’s. She had ignored this and gone anyway.

After spending the better part of an hour milling around in a patch of low winter sun and wondering if this single file method of summoning mortals up the front steps was efficient enough for the small window when they were permitted to view the prince, the doors had opened and she was ushered forward into St. Malo’s narthex. In the years that passed Mia remembered the details with diminishing clarity, and now as she made her way across the cathedral grounds the structure felt too tangible and earthly for how dreamlike the memory had become. She could remember the smell of the vestibule as the doors closed behind her, but even if she were to describe it as the burning of myrrh and sage and cyprus it would not convey what the smoke carried. A heavy wooden door, solid enough that no sunlight would ever touch the cathedral’s nave, separated Mia from the smudge, yet still it seeped through to where she stood. It was not often she considered the porousness of wood, but it occurred to her then that there was space between cells in woods just as there were in her, and she too was being permeated with smoke. 

She remembered the height of St. Malo’s after the doors swung open and held themselves there for her. A man, who had existed long beyond his natural years but done so with no bane in his body to preserve the image of eternal youth, asked her if she was holy, and at her answer he instructed her to tilt her chin up so a line of pale grey ash could be swiped across her throat. Above her, thousands of tiles made up the images of nemrtvi sveci or illustrated parable against a sea of gold, and Mia preferred the sight of the decorated arches over the man who’s vessel had begun to breakdown. When he spoke again it was with a ragged, lipless mouth.

“Idi sa svojim blagoslovom.” he said

“Yeah, um, i neka je blagoslov….uh, sa vama.”

With the blessings exchanged she stepped forward past him and to the back of the procession of mortals that were making their way up the nave. She could not see what they were approaching, there were too many bodies in front of her and, at a grand height of five foot three, even the bowed heads blocked her view of the aspe. It was dark as well, she had expected the twisting spiral candelabras that lined the aisles to hold pillars of wax and wick but on further thought considered that a candlelit cathedral was understandably gauche when, short of beheading, immolation was the most efficient way to bring a vampire to their end. Instead slender stems of neon stretched upwards in shades of crimson, pomegranate red, gold, and even several that seemed to give off the absence of light, which Mia would have thought impossible if not for how clearly darkness was cast across the palm of her hand as she held it up to the heatless, glowing pillar. Something moved in the aisles past the candelabras and she flinched. What little light there was in the cathedral dropped off before it could touch the far wall, casting that on either side of Mia in darkness, but she did not need to see more than the shape of what sat silent in the pews for to her stomach to knot and her gaze to pull away. The Drowned had come up to pay their respects to the Prince.

Mia kept her eyes up now, having seen enough of this strange place she had so willingly come too. Under her feet she began to feel the crunching of woody vines that spilled out from the pews and crept over into her path, catching their thorns into the soles of her boots; even as her heel meet something that reminded her too much of when she had felt her bicycle accidentally pass over the body of a dead bluebird in the gravel driveway of her childhood home, Mia’s gaze did not fall to her feet. After some steps she recognized a story in the mosaic tile; not a parable like above the aisles but an etiological myth that predated the scientific discover of upir lyssavirus as the cause of the bane, and one which was important enough to the Veceslav-Bozhena clan that it ran through the center of St. Malo’s.

When the world had began, the story went, life had been fleeting, finite, a cycle that marched ever onwards without thought or regard for those which were bound within it. Death, by its very nature, had always been the end of life. This was the world known by Zavida, who was not quite a farmer nor a painter nor a poet, and by Vlčenka, who did not need her husband to be any of these thing for her to love him. It had been the world they knew on the day Zavida was run through by an enemy’s sword, his blood spilled into the dirt at his feet and the dirt to which his body was committed after he was so grievously injured. The spoils of war had gone to the victor, his conqueror had left the farmland to rot with the buried Zavida and taken his spoils in the form of the widowed Vlčenka. Zavida’s body had not rotted though. He had sworn himself to Vlčenka not just until his death but after it as well, and no grave would hold his body down.

He had risen, starving and half mad, but whole as he crawled back to his beloved. The next image depicted Zavida only with red tiles, weather it was a metaphor for the monster he had risen as or a quiet literal depiction how he had brought an end to his enemies, Mia did not know, but she had always imagined the first vampire soaked in the blood of those who had sought to harm him. He had laid waste to the conqueror’s kingdom until there was not a soul in the keep but Vlčenka herself, who stood face to face with the feral, unflinching thing that had been her husband. She could have run, fled from the horror that had torn into flesh so indiscriminately that she had no reason to think that this would not be her end as well, yet she reach for him. Her hand shaking, Vlčenka had reached out to the monster and her quivering fingertips had touched the cheek of the man she loved, resurrected and returned to her.

There were flaws in this myth of course; upir lyssavirus had been isolated and thoroughly studied in modern times, disproving that a single man had created a new type of being simply by willing himself to be by his love’s side. Zavida himself had come to be known by so many names that there was doubt if he had ever been a man at all, or if Prvi Vampir as he had come to be known, was an amalgamation of the vampires Zaviša and Veceslav and Večni and countless others. The mosaics on the ceiling did not depict this ambiguity though. There was not room for footnotes in tilework and even if there was the would be no reason to, as the Veceslav-Bozhena clan based their royal claim on being the purist descendants of the Prvi Vampir. The story followed the architecture of the cathedral along a distant barrel vaulted ceiling until it met the aspe at the end of the St. Malo’s. Mia’s gaze now dropped to find the story ended not in a mosaic portrait but in flesh and bone; the too tall heads in front of her had departed and she was standing now with only an ornately carved altar rail between her and the most recent progeny of the royal bloodline.

There was kneeler with a cushion embroidery as intricate as the altar rail and Mia bent to rest the denim of her best jeans against it not out of some devotion or because the ash on her throat allowed her to be briefly holy, but because she felt the sudden urge to hid as much of herself behind the carved wooden barrier as she could. Queen Ivana’s heir sat high above the rest of them, a long leg crossed over the other and the side of his face resting lazily in his palm as he slouched in his cathedra seat. He was dressed modernly, his tailored suit and snakeskin boots traditional only in their carmine red color and the amount of gold and diamonds that decorated each of his fingers, his wrists, and hung heavy from his neck. A heavy fur cloak draped around his shoulders made the already tall and somewhat broad Prince look even larger, though this illusion was broken somewhat by what one could mistake as a large adult dog sitting at his feet. A moment’s inspection revealed it was neither an adult nor a dog, but a hellhound still young enough that it was not fully opening it’s ember-like eye. Still, the beast raised its head off its paws and looked up at it’s master, and when he glanced down at his pet a slight smile betraying the Prince’s otherwise apathetic expression.

The successor to the throne, known as nasljednik in vampiric tradition, shifted in his seat and leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees. It gave Mia a better view of his face, youthful and bored, his lips parted in an absentminded slackness that revealed a sliver of fang and a glint of gold. At the sight of this Mia felt strange, almost lightheaded, though that feeling was expected given that she had eaten exactly two hundred and fifty eight calories if she had counted her almonds right that day.

“Bow you little brat!” a voice behind her said with the kind of aggressiveness that was match only by how hard she pressed a plump hand to Mia’s back

“Hey lady, please chill.” 

The Prince became suddenly attentive, his lips pulling into a thin line and his posture straightening. With a slight motion of his hand he summoned bodies from the shadows and the impatient woman was pulled out of her place so swiftly that she did not even have a moment to ask to speak to whoever was in charge of the whole to-do. Mia looked back at the Prince and found that he had not returned to staring idly into the middle distance but was looking directly at her. His eyes were baby blue with heavy lids that were lifted in something akin to disbelief.

Blood rushed to Mia’s cheeks. Her mouth opened but the time she had spent memorizing the words and pronunciations to address a royal was all for naught, as no sound would escape her throat anyway. She stood up abruptly, taking an extra step backwards as she had nearly lost her balance, and when she regained her footing she turned sharply on her heels to make a straight and direct course to the nearest exit. The side door dumped her out into some less used bit of the cathedral grounds, dusted with midwinter snow and ending at a fence that could not be seen from the plaza but was so low and horizontally braced it looked as if it was begging to be scaled. Mia wiped the pale grey ash off her skin and made a note to remember this point of easy accessibility if she were to ever need to revisit St. Malo’s in a less ceremonial capacity.


	5. A Child of Vulgar Breeding

As the rattling metal box of public transit in which Mia was seated began to emerge from the darkness of a subterranean metro system, her phone also began to shake. The texts and comments that she had missed during her forty minutes underground came as a waterfall of notifications which she swiped away until she got to the ones she wanted to read. Ela had woken up that morning to find that her landlord had painted and taped off the front stoop without telling his tenants and she was now updating the group chat that the steps were still not usable when she came home from work and the she and her boyfriend had resorted to the fire escape window as their primary form of egress. Sloane had messaged Mia specifically to tell her about the apparently life changing salted melon cream puff she had just had, and the man known to be Mia’s inside source at the Order had texted to congratulate his former intern at getting a short but concise piece out on the state of St. Malo’s before the Order itself could. The city’s biggest necrology agency/ plagiarism ladened content farm was near-sighted in treating their interns like free labor and then cutting them loss before graduation, and Mia had said as much in response to her man-on-the-inside. He had agree that letting her get away was a fool’s error, though his choice of pronouns made it sound like he was not just speaking in professional terms.

Mia was thinking of little but professionalism at the moment. She has left the office at sundown and after checking their email exchange for the dozenth time that day, set out the where the vampire steward Boldizsár had agreed to meet with her.

It was a part of town that Mia was unfamiliar with, something she suspected Boldizsár had done on purpose, in the south of Marina where the vampire population was so dense the living were guests at best and interlopers at worst. Tamno Okrug was a true enclave; it had belonged to the undead even before the vampire who called himself Bijeli Kralj annexed the land and created the first utočište for his kind. There had been no laws protecting vampires back then and Rockefeller itself had been a sparse costal port that Bijeli Kralj had seemed like a fool for declaring himself king of, yet the already ancient vampire had imagined a future for the cluster of forested island in the estuary of the River Schuyler. He had founded a small mixed-mortality counsel which had planed that the refuge would host any vampire who came, as well as enough mortals to keep up the blood supply and tend to daylight activities. The decision had been calculated but it seemed their math was off; the average vampire turned a descendant once a century or so, while mortals collective grew their population in Rockefeller once every four and a half minutes. Three hundred and ninety six years later, the city’s undead had increase fivefold, and yet made up just over three percent of residents. If Mia had to guess, she would wager that all two hundred seventy thousand of them were milling around on the street when she descended the steps down from the metro platform.

Eyes that caught that caught the glow of streetlights in the same way a fox in the forest would catch your flashlight beam looked at the mortal with a look that was also not unlike a wild creature. When the Integration had happened nationally fifteen years prior, the Athansi clan on Tamno Okrug had appreciated the equal rights, but politely declined the part of the Integration that involved actually integrating. At the sight of her men in groups of three or four would step out of the way and whisper to each other as she passed, which was perhaps better than the men who were alone and without the accountability that stopped them from simply staring at the mortal until she was out of sight. Even women, who moved in their own groupings and looked around Mia’s age, had an air to their demeanor that betrayed the illusion of similarity.

Boldizsár had set up their meeting in the kind of banquet hall usually reserved for corporate events or weddings and large birthdays, a decision that was a noted departure from the standard of hosting a necrologist in a home or a hotel. If what Mia had heard about the steward was true this had done this had been a purposeful decision. The location allowed him to both flaunt how easily excess came to the Veceslav-Bozhena clan and instill in the necrologist the feeling that this was not a normal meeting well before they actually met. It had worked, though not to Boldizsár’s favor. Upon stepping in from the busy street to the sprawlingly empty lobby Mia instinctively moved herself to somewhere more sheltered, knowing that there was a ladies cloakroom just past the entrance. The building had submitted renovation plans to the Rockefeller Department of Buildings a few years prior, and as a senior necrologist Mia had little trouble accessing such records. 

She bypassed the chaperone that Boldizsár had left in the lobby for her and used a staff corridor to make her way through the building. He had given her the name of the conference room, a space named after a now expired vampire who had done something important enough during the war to have things named after him but not important enough for a mortal born at the tail-end of the reconstruction to remember what exactly that was. Even if he had not provided her with this, Mia would have still easily found Boldizsár, as the shout of his barely stifled shouting carried into the hallway. 

“-acting like an impulsive, ignorant child! Ill-governed as well!” 

A derisive laugh answer this, followed by a spoken response in a voice that was sweet and breathy “But of course, any royal with you as their steward has experienced their share of being ill-governed.”

She waited but heard only the man speaking in the room, as even when the woman began a statement her voice was overlapped by a louder accusation. It was clear that Mia would be there with her ear to the door all evening if she wanted another clear sentence from which she could try to identify the voice. She let the male speaker build up nearly to the thesis of his diatribe and then purposely interrupted him with a curt knock.

“Yes? Who is it?”

“It’s Esinamia Whitt.” she said “I….have a meeting scheduled with you.”

There was a moment’s pause and then the female speaker answered “Yes, come in.”

Mia had expected a few things on the other side of the door; she had expected the conference room to be the kind that either had plastic tables or the kind with a glass crystal chandelier but not the sort of space that had both, and she had expected whoever the female speaker was to be the kind that Boldizsár had the authority to talk over. She had been wrong on both accounts. Her eyes went from Lux to the arrangement of faux jewels that diffused the bare bulbs of a light fixture and then back to Lux, who put a hand to the left side of her chest and gave a small nod. Mia, as a member of the living, touched her right side as she returned the greeting. Boldizsár gave only a suspicious scowl.

“You were to be escorted to this chamber.” he said, smoothing down the edges of his vest with both hands and then folding them on the table in front of him

“I must’ve missed my chaperone on the way in.”

The slightest flash of amusement flitted across Lux’s face, but was gone by the time Mia looked at her again. While Boldizsár’s appearance had been shaped by a virus that had found an evolutionary advantage in repairing each decaying cell to a perfection that would enthrall and disarm a mortal, Lux had been beautiful even in life. In the past century and a half had become so devastatingly gorgeous that Mia did not want to rest her eyes on her for fear that she would never be able to look away. 

“It would have been preferred for you to follow the protocol, Miss….what was it?”

“Whitt.” she informed him, despite her name having been at the end of every email exchange “Esinamia Whitt. Senior researcher at the Docton Agency for Necrological Archivery.”

“Yes, yes, I read over the documents you sent me.”

“No you didn’t.”

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t think you read the documents I sent you.” she said again. At the edge of her vision she could see that Lux had steepled her hands in front of her mouth and was watching with curiously raised eyebrow. “Because, well, a vampire your age should breathe in accordance with the Coulombe Aspiration Pattern, and while I’ve documented vampires that sometimes deviate from the pattern as a nervous tic, I’ve already see your tic. I upset your sense of control over this meeting when I bypassed the chaperone and showed up on my own, and you fixed your clothes to assert to yourself that you still have control over your presentation at least, and when you did that there was no idiosyncratic breath. So, given that, there’s not really any reason you would take in an entire lungful of air just to say like, ten words, unless of course you were doing something else Coulombe recorded which he called mortal posturing. Most Common Era vampires, even the ones in lokaliteti that are utočišta, were taught to mimic traits of the living when they wanted to be trusted or given credibility….and that was a pretty mortal looking breath you took when you told me you had read what I sent you.”

Boldizsár paused and blinked slowly “Are you alleging I’ve spoken falsely?”

“Oh, sorry if I wasn’t being concise enough for you. I’m calling you out for lying to me and also you’re kind of a bad liar. If you want you can just tell me the truth now and I won’t hold it against you or anything.”

“Hold it against me?” he laughed and turned to the other vampire at the table, who did not share in his incredulous tone. “Did you hear the girl? As if she is in any position to hold something against me.”

Lux lowered her hand to give him an agreeable smile and asked “Did you read the documents that Miss Whitt sent you, Boldizsár?”

“Did you come here simply to undermine me, Lux?”

“I’ve come here on royal orders.”

“Oh, of course. You’re procuring the Prince another whore.”

“Hey!” Mia said loudly “Don’t fucking call me whore!”

The steward threw up his hands, “Then please, tell me what it is you are.”

“I’m Esinamia Whitt, senior researcher at the Docton Agency for Necrological Archivery. I hold degrees in both Necrological Journalism and Sempiternal Historiography from Fridan University and my professional accomplishments include over two hundred commitments to the tomes across nine different clans in and outside of Rockefeller, my JV-92 certification as well as my TMF-6.21, and both my AR-E and AC-E qualifications exceed the city’s minimum hourly requirements. I’ve written about the Prince since his Ordainment and have shown myself to be a decent, trustworthy, and respectful necrologist. For those reason I believe I’m deserving of a meeting with Njegovo Kraljevsko Visočanstvo, Prince Stoney.”

“No.”

“Respectfully, I have to say-”

“No.”

“If you’ll allow me to-”

“No.”

Mia sighed and started again “Okay, listen-”

“No, you listen to me Miss Whitt, I am not the fool you take me for. What I am concealing from you is my disgust. My disgust that a child of vulgar breeding would have the audacity to stand in my presence and ask for an audience with nasljednik.”

“You- this is your meeting. You told me to come here.”

“As is a steward’s duty.” he said as if this was explanation enough “I would have thought a necrologist of your qualifications would have the decency not to attend, though it’s become clear to me that you do not have an excess of manners.”

“You couldn’t’ve said that in an email? I can’t imagine you had much else to do, seeing as you’re not really the Prince’s advisor and confidant anymore, are you?”

Boldizs ár looked shocked for a moment, as if he had been struck, and then stood up stiffly “I will not sit here and have my royal appointment insulted. You do not have my approval to speak to nasljednik, you do not have my approval to meet with him, to look at him, to imagine yourself in his presence. Whatever penance you think you have paid with your little opinion column is far from enough. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have no more time to indulge the fantasies of such a detestable mortal.”

He spun on his heels and strode across the room, swinging open a door and slamming it with such force Mia felt every muscle in her body tense. She stood there for a moment, gathering herself in an attempt to be the sort of person who had never learned to fear such a sound as being a precursor to something worse.

“You’ll have to forgive me if my colloquialisms are not the most chic,” Lux said softly as she addressed Mia directly for the first time “but I believe this is when someone of your generation would say ‘big yikes’?”

“Yeah, uh….‘oof’ works too.”

“Oof?” she repeated and then smiled “I do love an onomatopoeia.”

“Glad, uh, glad I could….help. I’m sorry that you came all the way to the city for this.”

“This meeting was not the subject of my royal orders.”

“What- what was.”

“A salted….melon cream puff. I admit, an unusual custard for a profiterole, but I’ve heard they’ve gone….‘viral on the Feed’….and Stoney is fond of spoiling those he cares for.”

“Really? My friend literally just had one of those.”

“Are they not sold out for the day?”

“They are but my friend is in this like, like a book club except they don’t read, and one of the other women is a pastry chef at the place that makes them so she brought a box to their weekly discussion.”

“What do they discuss?”

“Um, gossip, I guess?”

“Oh, I love gossip, the uh….spilling tea?”

“Yeah.” Mia laughed “Sorry, I don’t mean to like….the slang is very endearing.”

“Thank you.”

“So….” she ran her hands over her short hair and interlaced her fingers behind he neck “I guess this is the end line on the whole interviewing the Prince thing, huh?”

Lux nodded soberly “You understand that without the approval of the royal steward I could not grant you a formal meeting with the Prince?” 

“Yeah, I get that.”

“Miss Whitt.” she said, looking at her with a certain intensity “You understand I cannot grant you a formal meeting?”

“I-” she started and then stopped, looking back at the vampire, searching for a tell in her poised expression “You know uh, informally, you can just call me Mia.”

“Duly noted, or should I say….bet.”

“Yeah. Bet. Um, on my information the second number listed is my personal cell phone number….if that’s useful to you.”

“It was a pleasure meeting with you, Mia.” the corner of Lux’s mouth nearly twitched into a smile, but she gave away nothing else. With a nod she stood and exited out the same door Boldizsár had stomped through moments earlier.


	6. The Burek Express on 81st and Terzić

Mia had begun to walk north from Tamno Okrug, parallel enough with the Metro line that she could jog her path over to it at any junction but also so that if she remained without crossing she would find herself at the southern boarder of Trokut soon enough. It was perhaps not the wisest decision for a woman to wander alone through such a section of the city at night, but she was also a woman who carried a six inch blade in her boot so giving her trouble for doing so was not the wisest decision either. The street lights here were sparse, but they were made up for by the glow of neon signs that competed for attention as they seduced passersby with stolen cell phone to pawn and scratch off lottery cards to be disappointed by. A bus stop, occupied at this time of night only by a sleeping man with bags around his shoes and an inventive way of getting around the uncomfortable bars meant to keep the homeless from lying flat on the benches, brightened her path with its back little poster public service announcement.

The space normally reserved to advertise some wine delivery app or a new show that was streaming had been bumped aside for a public health crisis so deadly that it preempted capitalism in at least a half dozen bus stops for almost as many weeks. A minimalist infographic poster with information in three languages showed the warming signs of Necro overdoses. Stick figures with no gender, race, or sexuality were shown slumped over, colored blue with cold hands, and with pinprick pupils in their ethnically indeterminate eyes. Below text described a ‘good faith’ meant to encourage users to call medical professionals, and information on how to become licensed to administer a drug that went by the brand name Allivox and could keep a mortal heart beating through an overdose long enough for their kidneys and liver to filter out the poison. It was the most effective treatment Rockefeller or any of the lokaliteti across Unified Larentia had, but was terribly underutilized. 

The average Rockefellian did not just happen upon an overdose, and if they did it was unlikely they had any of the knowledge needed to discern between someone who had taken too much of the same solarized Necro used in medical facilities or if they were on the black stuff; blood taken directly from the veins of the undead, unexposed to sunlight, and teeming with the living bane of upir lyssavirus.

One did not even have to listen closely to hear a story of some unfortunate soul who had not made this distinction and found themselves too close to a newly resurrected undead. Every vampire, from the crude and slack-jawed ones that hung around outside the radnja to the unflappably poised Lux had come back from the darkness frenzied and hysterical. Those who were turned intentionally were restrained, sometimes for a full week, for their safety and that of the mortal population. Those who were not turned intentionally rose alone, with a ravenous need for the red blood that the bane lived on being their sole and undeterrable motivation.

Having had entirely too long to be alone with her thoughts, and having crossed into Trokut several blocks ago, Mia pulled her phone from her pocket and scrolled until she found an active icon beside someone she wanted to talk to.

“Hey.”

“Hi, what’s up?” on the other side of the video call a young man named Levi adjusted his phone on the workbench he had set it up on when Mia called 

“Is Ela sleeping at your place tonight?”

“Nope, her place.” 

“Boooo. I’m in Trokut and I want to eat pita on your stoop.”

“You can hang out on my stoop with me.” he said “We’re friends too.”

“Yeah, you’re down for a midnight dinner chat?”

“It’s midnight?” he turned to a clock that she could not see from her angle, a head full of dark, silken hair that was too long to belong to anyone who worked regular office hours swishing around the enormous pair of ears it’s length was intended to cover.

“It’s quarter after.” she said “What are you even doing right now?”

“Just lathing some pine for this sack back Windsor chair I’m working on.”

“Wow, I did not understand most of the words in that sentence. Are my woes enough to satiate you or do you want pita?”

“Pita please, hvala.”

“No worries. I’m guessing zeljanica, you vegetarian fuck.”

“You can’t just put ‘fuck’ at the end of something and make it an insult. That’s now how insults work.” rolled his eyes “What are you doing in Trokut anyway?”

“I’m just sort of wandering north from Tamno Okrug. Did Ela tell you about that meeting I had scheduled so the Prince’s steward could call me a child of vicious breeding and a detestable mortal because that just happened.” 

“Sounds rough.”

“My expectations were low.”

“So this vampire steward, was he like….” Levi motioned with his hands “Spooky? Ela said she saw one whose eyes were just these big black pupils the other night, there were no white or anything.”

“That’s not what she saw. She saw a vampire with tattoo ink in their sclera. Either an Old One, which is unlikely since I’m assuming she was just going about her night in normal mortal way, or a post-Integration vampire who wanted to look like an Old One.”

“Why would they do that?”

“I don’t know, I’m a necrologist not a dowsing rod for their individual motivations.” she said “Historically, the Old Ones had a….proclivity towards marking themselves with runes and scared geometry whether by scarification or tattooing or both, is because they were basically regarded as living gods, despite being neither. The freakier looking they were the more feared they were, the more feared the more worshipped. The reason it rapidly fell off in the Common Era is because humanity did a one-eighty and figured out how to kill their gods. After that they became monsters. The more they could blend in the more chance they had at passing. There’s a handful of them who were seafarers or in gangs but I have more tattoos that the average one turned during the Common Era.”

“And the new ones?”

“Post-Integration vampires are punks.”

Levi laughed “I thought they were brats.”

“Rascals, jackanapes, užasno dete.” she said “They just don’t have any reason to hide, aside from ult-nat hate groups but, you know, the LDF hates people like me too. Someone raised with their values who’s now buddy-buddy with the vampiric community? The only thing worse than working for them is if I was in a mixed-mortality relationship like that woman who got fake blood thrown on her in Scrugg’s Basin the other day.”

“I didn’t hear about that.”

“You usually don’t.” she said, and then “The only thing keeping post-Integration undead from being the new gods is no one fucking respects them. Even the Brat Prince, he as devotees but I’d hardly say the root of his magnetism is the sense of respect he instills in his citizens.”

“Is he trying to look like an Old One, with his tattoos?”

“Again, not a dowsing rod of individual motivation.” she shrugged “If he is then he’s not doing a very accurate job of it. I think he’s just a punk that didn’t want to look like pale pudgy baby when he was in the tabloids next to full sleeve neck tattoo’d former international child star pop sensation Jace Maverick. What a weird year of pop culture that was.”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway, I’m going to pop in this Burek Express up here. I’ll buzz when I get yours.”

“Alright, see you in a bit. Get napkins.”

“Yeah, see you soon.”

She hung up the call and blinked in the royal blue and yellow neon that turned bright white when shining onto the dirty sidewalk. 

At seventeen Mia had started to starve herself, because all of the girls were starving themselves and the boys like it so much that Mia would have rathered wasted away from malnutrition than to waste away from being overlooked. The next three years were all ribs and thin thighs. She had felt lithe and delicate in a way that had not been afforded to the child of violent breeding, and she could drape just about anything over her unnaturally angular frame and find that this made her worthy of attention. It was said that the orphans and abandoned children raised in a  sirotište all grew up to be some kind of addict, and Mia had avoided that fate by testing high enough on her Grenald-Cohn test to be granted the privilege of a foster home in Giry. Later she would think that whoever said a suburban upbringing would save a teenaged girl from feeling empty inside had never been a teenaged girl.

Mia had found her addiction in the form of boys, always older than her and leaned against the hoods in parking lots, tragedy in their eyes and promises on their lips. She had been skinny in their cars as they drove to Marina, feeling like this was the only thing she needed to fill the hollowness in her. How could her body be home to loneliness with girls she had left the suburbs with all hanging around on countertops and in the tub as she dyed her bleach damaged hair yet another color in a motel bathroom. How could she feel unwanted when a boy who could have had any of her friends told Mia to stay everyone else left at the end of the night.

College came and the boys had different names and different faces but she had stopped paying attention to those kinds of things. Mia’s bedroom in Giry gave was traded for a dorm room in Angulem and yet she still found herself in strangers’ beds and backseats in Marina. This was how she had gotten to know the island. Long before she had darted around it with her Drop™ app on and a sling bag full of the red stuff she had walked it’s street in uncomfortable shoes that had no room for a blade in them. She would get what she wanted from them; car rides, alcohol, attention, and give them what they wanted from her. When it was over she would get turned out onto the street to realize that her hunger was not abstract or poetic, it was just hunger. 

If there was a reliable man in her life it was whoever had founded Burek Express, the twenty four hour fast food counter that popped up in unfavorable neighborhoods like wildflowers grew in open fields. No matter what the hour they could fulfill all your low priced grilled meat needs, and with a two days empty stomach Mia needed nothing else like a slice of burek.  It was their namesake variety of pita, beef and onion wrapped phyllo so oily you could barely distinguish it from the filling, warm grease pooling in the thin wrapper and soaking through the extra napkins you had wrapped around the waxy paper as you walked yourself home. By the time she was nineteen Mia knew each of the restaurant's Marina locations like one would know the personality of a classmate or regularly seen acquaintance. 

An aging man with torn up pants and rat that lived in his pocket was regularly kicked out of the Burek Express on Beech and Zeleno. There were two on Olmsted Parkway, the one by 66th Street dealing in fast food and the one on 94th doing most of its business with back door drugs. On 62nd between Park and Pabco there was a cashier with a glass eye and brows so thin she must have sharpened her pencil to a point every morning. The Burek Express on 81st and Terzić was so narrow and lacking in neon signage that one might miss it if they walked too fast, but she spent more hours there during her sophomore year than she did in the university library. It had only a counter to sit at, it’s laminate peeling and always sticky. The boy who mopped the always dirty lobby when he was not busy turning ćevapi on the grill looked almost sheepish about how impossible to clean his place of employment was. Mia would feign looking at the menu, tilting up the head she would one day buzz when the bleach and purple dye caught up to her, but her eyes would watch the messy hair employee as he looked at her. In another life she may have had some softness for the young man that parted his lips as if he wanted to talk to her, but who’s shyness was given away by how white the knuckles that gripped his broom handles were. A cashier not worth remembering would wrap up a slice of burek from its place under the heat lamp, handing it to Mia and sending her on her way before the young man ever worked up the courage to make an introduction.


	7. An Invitation

Two weeks passed with no word from Lux. Mia kept her phone face up on her desk and put her email on autorefresh, scarcely wanting to leave her desk during working hours for fear that the vampire’s hint of possibly would be one that existed only momentarily. When the email did not come, though, she had returned to her habit of wandering through the collaborative lounge pit and around the stationary bike powered charging station. There were windows along the edges of the office; on one side one could look down into a narrow side streets where teeming bags of trash were stacked ten feet high behind restaurants that offered tasting menus, and on the other you could watch tourists on cobblestone streets gaze up and pose for Feed pictures in front of the cast iron facade of LoBo. She thought to herself that she should have some opinion about this, watching the city from several floors up, all its waste and vanity on display, but she had none. It was just looking as far as she was interested. The world was full of things that she had no reason to be concerned with even if they were on the same streets she used to get to and from her office.

Since the meeting DANA had submitted their piece on the St. Malo’s attack, unable to wait as the other agencies in the city began submitting theirs. It was penned by Mads and Brint together, having reached no conclusion other than an accelerant based fire had happened and that the refugees were out of the cathedral after being called to the Royal Keep for an address that had never happened. A small note at the bottom indicated that their agency still had several active cases on the matter, but those who kept the tomes would not bother reading the fine print.

Mia had read it over before she left on Friday night, having spent too long looking at her own cases about the dispute between the Dalibor clan and the Pridvor clan, or about Valerius, Blood of Maqsud who had decided that he had grown bored of being an immortal socialite of the  Vasilii clan and wanted to be professional prize fighter instead. It was not hers to work on without an interview and even if it had been it was too late for edits. The piece would go live at midnight and it would be cemented in the tomes forevermore.

Later, in her Cube by Dwell™, Mia had eaten a pouch of microwave quinoa and switch awake the monitor on her wall to watch the piece go live. Slowly, as the hour progressed, runs of text would be highlighted and linked to some comment or observation. The reader numbers would rise and fall as many of them seemed to stay on the page only long enough to skim it before disappearing from the indication at the top of the page. One reader, who was not logged in or did not have an account on DANA’s website, would appear as reading for the full duration of the article, disappear for several minutes, and then reappear again. Mia watched this with some curiosity, wondering who would read an article half a dozen times over in such a short time. She threw her quinoa pouch in one of the recycling slots at the end of the corridor and came back to watch the sparse comments and consider getting high.

Dušan from college had sent her enough edibles that she would not have to talk to her dealer for months. A not insignificant portion of Mia’s free time had been given over to playing  Rub Univerzuma in the days following her download, she had joined his crew as she had planned, and their small posse had been exploring the digital universe and all its dangers. It was a matter of time though, until Dušan yelled. His voice had boomed through the headset as the crew found themselves in intergalactic peril and Mia was slow to grab her controller because she had been painting her nails. After he had gone a certain kind of quiet, one reserved for someone who had known the necrologist since before she was a necrologist, who had been through their early twenties with her, and knew not to raise his voice to her. He had apologized profusely, and she had told him that the world was not obligated to account for anyone; they did not stop building skyscrapers because some people were afraid of heights. He had sent her a care package of sheet masks and edibles in lieu of the apology she would not accept. 

Mia laid back in her bed, pantless and wearing the loose fitting shirt of a youth outreach program she had volunteered in exactly long enough to get the Community Credit and not a moment longer. She had scrubbed off her makeup and smoothed a tea tree and ginseng sheet mask over her cleansing wipe reddened face while she read the blurb on the back of a package of pear flavored 25mg sour gummies. She was considering the amount of quinoa she had just eaten, her stomach full of the slow digesting pseudocereal, and the fact that if she turned on Drop ™ now she could probably make just enough money that she could go out that weekend without worrying about how much it cost to go out. 

Her deliberation was short lived though, as apparently Mia could only lie pantless in bed for so long without falling asleep. The corridor was quiet at quarter to one in the morning, everyone who was out already there and everyone who was staying in well settled into their Pods and Cubes. Mia slept with the soundness of someone who had been trading restfulness for video games for the past few nights and  it took the chiming notification of a video chat request for her to open her eyes again. It was not unusual for Sloane to call her fellow necrologist at this hour, their professional proximity to the undead making the pair of mortal friends somewhat nocturnal themselves, nor was it unusual for her to call her from accounts Mia had never seen before, Sloane’s habit of showing her butthole to strangers for money making it so her accounts were regularly terminated. 

“Sanja ® ,” she said aloud and the lights in her Pod turned a pleasant shade of turquoise to let her know the voice activation was listening. Mia had opened her eyes briefly to see a pictureless username that followed the same style of anaragram, piglatin, or hodgepodge of letter vaguely similar to her name that Sloane was prone to use when she made these account. She had closed them a second later against the virtual assistant’s light “Accept video call.”

“Accepting video call.” the pleasantly artificial female voice of Sanja ® responded 

“Hello?” another voice, this one neither artificial nor female and with an almost dry rasp that precluded it from being what was commonly called pleasant, answered on the other side of the screen.

Mia scrambled upright “Oh fuck!”

“This a bad time?”

“No! It’s- uh, um,” the sheet mask flopped forward off of Mia’s face, leaving a sheen of tacky residue which she quickly wiped on her sheets “Hi?”

“Hi.” the Brat Prince smiled into the knuckles that he was resting his face against as he looked into the small screen “I made Lux give me your number, is that chill?”

“I- yeah, I mean it’s chill that you’re calling me.”

“Alright, cool.” he nodded and took a drag of his cigarette. His face, youthful and placid with liquor, was covered in shadow. He was sitting somewhere dark, with lights moving behind him just beyond the edge of banquet seating he seemed to be settled in the corner of. There was a drink in the same hand that was holding the cigarette. “You wanna come hang out?”

“What?”

“I said do you- is it too loud in here? It’s too loud, ain’t it?” he looked past the screen and at the source of the chatter happening on the other side of the camera “Hey, hey hey hey! Can I say something? Can I say my thing?....All y’all shut the fuck up. I’m on a call.”

“No, I heard you I just, um, where are you?”

“Oh! Rockefeller….Angulem….” the heir to the throne furrowed his brow as if he was just now considering that he had no further idea of where he was “I’ll drop a pin.”

“Okay.”

“Is that okay like you wanna come through? It’s-” he angled his phone to show that he was not alone in the booth. At the sight of the screen his slew of companions pulled faces and posed without asking who was on the other side of the call “the whole crew out here. We’re getting weird, we’re getting wild, and uh, you’re cordially invited by order of the Brat Prince.” 

“Oh, well, how could I refuse,” she laughed

“If you don’t really wanna we cou-” the Prince had started to say but was cut off by another face butting into frame

“Aye! She got friends?” shouted a vampire who’s most distinct feature would be the width of his mouth even if it wasn’t wide open as he laughed like a hyena on amphetamines

“Who’s that?” a third vampire came into frame, apparently standing up in the booth and falling over his friend “Yo! Is that the necrologist?”

“Fuck off, both of you, šupaki.” the Prince groaned and shooed them away, for a moment the screen was a blur of tattooed hands and diamond cufflinks “Sorry about them.”

“It’s fine, you’re good. But, uh, yes to both of their questions. I’m a necrologist and I have several friends actually.”

“Yeah? You wanna bring your people?”

“Is that okay with you?”

“Is it okay with you if I don’t wanna talk to them?”

“Y-yeah.” she stumbled, not expecting one of the most powerful vampires in the city to ask her permission to ignore her friends “Do whatever you’re….comfortable with?”

“Y’all got addresses? I’ll send a couple cars.”

“Sure, I’m at uh, 957 Pekar St and….what’s Sloane’s address….actually, can I message you? I’m going to check in with them before, you know, sending cars to their places.”

He nodded a confirmation “You do wanna hang out though, yeah? Cause I know when chicks put on those freaky face sheets they usually done for the night.”

“Oh, no, I was just doing a….self care.”

“Right. I heard that’s important for….well- wellness?”

Mia laughed “They probably don’t do anything but it makes me feel better about being a nightmare person who runs off of cheap burek and spite.” she said, and a look too fleeting and shadowed to read flashed across the face on her screen “Okay, I’m going to text my friends now and uh, then I’ll send you what’s up and we’ll hang out.”

“Sure.” the Brat Prince pulled his lips tight like someone trying to make their smile not so obvious “See you soon.”


	8. No Good Place for a Dagger

“My heart is literally going to beat out of my chest.” Mia said, turning circles in the small square of walking space in her Cube since she could not fully pace in such a confined area “This is how I die. I’m going to get there, look him in the eye, and my heart is going to literally rip itself out of my chest. Look at my hands! My hands are shaking!”

Sloane leaned closer to her laptop screen “Them’s a-shaking alright.” 

“How am I supposed to do my eyeliner like this!” she threw her head back dramatically and then sat crosslegged on her bed, where she had already taken out the tray and small mirror she used to do her makeup most days. She muttered just loud enough for Sloane to hear as she smoothed a mattifying primer over her face. “Why would he do this to me? This is unfair, this is illegal, and I’m going to fight him.”

“What are you going to wear?”

“I don’t know, well I do know, I just don’t know about it.”

Sloane moved her laptop slightly so she could stay in frame as she picked out her own outfit for the evening “Is it the bralette and blazer?”

“It is the bralette and blazer.”

“Hell yeah! Knock me out!”

“I’m just not sure about it.” she pinched her lower lip between her teeth as she thought

“Why? It’s the perfect outfit.” Sloane said “It establishes that you’re powerful, you’re sexy, and though your vagina is completely inaccessible you may be down to do some above the waist stuff in a bathroom stall.”

“I’m not doing above the waist stuff in a bathroom stall.”

“Oh alright.” she nodded “You’re going to want to wear a skirt for below the waist stuff.” 

“Šuti.” she rolled her eyes before closing them to sweep shadow across their lids “I just, don’t have anywhere good to carry my dagger if I’m wearing heels.”

“Have you ever considered not carrying a fucking knife on you all the time?”

“No.”

There was a knock on the acrylic door that separated Mia’s Cube from the corridor and a vague shape that was tall and lean could be made out on the other side of the not quite opaque material. Mia set down her brush for a moment so she could reach across and let Kit in.

“Hey, what’s up?” he said, looking from Mia to the screen with Sloane’s face on it and then back to Mia “I got your text.”

“Good, yeah, that’s uh….about what’s up.”

“He just called you?”

“Mhm.” 

“And that’s a thing that just happens?”

“Well I’m a necrologist and he’s vampire so, yeah, it happens.”

He sat down on the edge of Mia’s bed, looking around and looking at the screen. Sloane held up various articles of clothing and while Mia busied herself building up a warm peachy all over base color for the smokey plum in the outer corner that would bring out the warmth of her brown eyes. Kit considered each of Sloane's outfits, nodding and shrugging or shaking his head until the necrologist on the other side of the video call had put something complete together.

“Are you nervous?” he asked when Mia was to the point of cleaning away the eyeshadow fall out from her cheeks.

“Pfft, what? No, no way. I talk to vampires like, all the time. Why would I be nervous?”

“Because you have a crush on him.”

Mia scoffed defensively “I’m twenty six years old. I don’t have some playground crush. I’m not writing his initials in my pencil case and hoping he sits next to me at lunch. Alright? The undead are just charismatic, it’s a biological trait of the bane. It has nothing to do with the Prince because he’s like, not even that cute for a vampire.”

“Yeah but you do have a crush.” Sloane said, motioning through the screen for Kit to close his eyes so she could change without ending the call “I proofread all of your articles, and girl, you’re soft as hell when it comes to that užasno dete.”

“Even if I did have a crush on him-”

“Which you do.”

“I wouldn’t, it’s like, I couldn’t actually like-”

“Get that undead dick.” Sloane said “Because of the thing.”

“What thing?” Kit asked

“Mia’s in a self-inflicted dick drought. She fucks for the intimacy and not the physicality now which means she hasn’t hooked up with anyone in a thousand years.”

“It’s not a dick drought.” she said, checking her highlight in the mirror before closing the pressed powder “It’s intermittent celibacy. It means there are stretches of time where sex isn’t something I concern myself with or….do, at all.”

Kit looked thoughtful for a moment “Physicality is it’s own sort of intimacy, though. Not to sound blue but, in my experience, it’s always preceded deeper affections. Closing yourself off to that….avoids vulnerability but what is love if not mutual vulnerability?”

“Light Above.” Sloane said as if merely listening to Kit had been a labor

“What?”

“You can just say you fuck your girlfriends before you’re in love with them.”

Mia finished her makeup and looked back at him “Yeah, it’s fine. And anyway I’m not looking to like, meet-cute some guy in a coffee shop and have our summer romance turn into an enduring love that lasts until my dying breath.”

“Why not?”

“Cause she’s fucked up.” Sloane answered as she threaded a belt around the middle of her jumpsuit “Got a bad case of ‘accepting the love she thinks she deserves’ if you ask me. That’s why all her relationships fall apart the moment a guy really cares for her. She thinks anyone that would love her is delusional or stupid, so they never last past the four month mark.”

“What about the guy in college?” he looked at Mia “Didn’t you lived together?”

Sloane shook her head “We don’t talk about Torin unless it’s regarding how I’m going to attack him like a rabid animal if he ever shows his stupid smug face around Mia ever again.”

“Oh.” 

“Anyway I’m not going to fuck the Brat Prince and you can express your disappointment now and we can go to this club like normal broke cute girls that charm boys into buying us drinks and then disappear into the dawn never to be seen again.”

“Is that what girls do at clubs?”

“Mhm,” Mia and Sloane agreed as a notification showed up at the top of the former’s screen. The contact was still identified as a somewhat random assortment of letter as Mia was unsure what one saved the Vampire Prince of Rockefeller in their phone as.

“Is that him?”

“Yep.” she nodded “Oh shit, car’s ten minutes away. Kit, get out, I have to get dressed.”

“Bralette and blazer!” Sloane shouted much to the confusion of their male companion “Do it! Do it! Do it! Hot girl summer! Knock me out! Step on my faaaaace!”

“Fine!” she laughed as she pushed Kit into the corridor “You’re such a bad influence.”

“I’m a great influence, you beautiful bitch. Let’s go meet the motherfucking Brat Prince.”


	9. A Change of Plans

The Šumarak had not immediately reveal its shape to the settlers of what would become Rockefeller, but they had felt something strange in their bones even before they had looked down to see that their compasses were spinning wildly and unable to find north. Marina, like the other islands of the city, had been forest once. As more and more people made their home there they had cleared it in swathes, turning trees into ships and lumber and firewood as they made room for lives the be led. This was how they had found the Šumarak. Like a sculptor seeing their figure in the marble and chipping away the excess stone, the edges of the lightless forest formed as the trees around it were sawn away. Five hundred acres by approximation and extending another hundred feet down and twice that into the airspace, the grove had taken shape.

Mia, Sloane, Kit, and Jasna sat comfortably in the nicest SUV any of them had ever been in as they passed the lightless forest; Ela had not been able to come because she was working and also three days into a juice cleanse that barred her from drinking alcohol. Three of the passengers had never been inside the grove, and one was actively afraid of it, turning her face so a curtain of red-tinted blonde hair blocked her view through the window. Mia had wanted to tell her that there was no reason to be afraid of the trees just beyond the expressway, that evil would not come galloping out to claim her, but she could not be certain of this herself. There were things in most every patch of forest that could kill a mortal, but there were things in the Šumarak that could maim a soul. 

There was no illumination within the dense trees because no bulb would glow once inside it, electronics would not turn on and sparks would not catch. A flame brought in would shrink and smoke as if cut off from oxygen, which was strange since the forest itself sounded almost as if it was breathing. The sound of passing vehicles rattled the windows of the neglected houses too close to the elevated roadway but did not touch the Šumarak. It was not muffled, dampened, or even reflected. Waves of sound made their way up to the edge of the darken grove and then, upon reaching it, simply ceased to exist. The direct opposite of Jasna, Kit had been staring into the darkness with an unflinching curiosity. He scarcely moved until the moment that all at once the grove vanished from view. They had come upon the darkness quickly and left it behind with the same suddenness, street lights and glowing signs of a commercial strip making Kit pull his face away from the window and blink as he adjusted to the lights of the city again.

The SUV merged into bridge traffic, light enough at this time of night that they moved steadily over the river before dipping below ground for a quarter of a mile. Rockefeller had been built by vampires as much as it had the living, and while mortals had reveled in the sunlight the undead had build their avenues underground, hollowing out the earth to be safe from the solarization that would kill the very thing in their blood keeping them from returning to dirt. The car crested above surface and turned sharply onto a side street, stopping in front of an inconspicuous looking storefront with a sign that called Davidović’s Laundry.

The letters had been hand painted the year the laundromat had opened and in the decades since had remained there unbothered. It had aged as most things did, developing a faded and slightly weathered looked that would have been difficult to replicated otherwise. It had remained there as the neighborhood changed from boarding houses and studios of starving artists to fashion houses and galleries of not so starving artist. When the SUV stopped outside it and Kit considered commenting on this last vestige of the common class before wondering why they were stopped outside of a laundromat in the first place.

“Why did we stop outside a laundromat?”

“We didn’t.” Sloane said as she opened the door and stepped out. A few dozen people milled around under the awning of the next building over, at first glance looking like they were waiting for an entrance there but upon further inspection were simply being held back several feet from the front of Davidović’s Laundry.

“Yeah we did.” Kit said “This is a laundromat.”

“This is the club.”

“The club’s inside a laundromat?”

“No, the laundromat is the club.”

“It’s a club and a laundromat?”

“No, it’s just a club.”

“But this is a laundromat.”

“No it’s not.”

“Ugh!” Jasna cried and linked her arm in Kit’s so she could march up to the man standing outside of the door “Hi, my name’s Jasna, I’m here with Mia Whitt who was specifically invited by the Prince, and I’d like to go inside.”

“ID?” he asked, and she flipped the laminated card out of her bag. Kit reached for his wallet and found his while Mia and Sloane jogged forward past the line to present their identification as well.

“Cool?” she said to the bouncer, who responded with a nod and waved them inside.

For a moment Kit seemed vindicated, as the room beyond the door had every indication of being exactly what he expected. There were washers on one side and dryers on the other, carts, tables for folding, a counter for the staff to sit behind, and a bathroom with an out of order sign. It was deserted save for them, but so were most 24-hour laundromats at this late at night. As he considered whether he was going to point out that he had been right or ask again what they were doing there Jasna walked forward into the unusable bathroom, followed by Mia, and then by Sloane, who turned and motioned for him to follow them into the room that was not nearly big enough to hold four people and the expected plumbing.

Fortunately it had not needed too, as there were no porcelain fixtures in the room. On the wall that he had expect them to be plumbed into was a second door, this one a bit heavier, but understandably so when it was pushed open. 

“It’s a club.” he said, to the eyeroll of both Sloane and Jasna. 

If they had said some response to him after he would not have heard it over the thumping of music. It took his eyes a moment to adjust between the overhead fluorescents of a fully lit laundromat facade and the lighting expected in a club. In fact, there was something unremarkable about the back of Davidović’s Laundry. With the exception of it’s anachronistic entrance, Kit could not find a single notable thing about the club. From it’s design to drinks to clientele, it was all exactly as Kit had expected for a club in Angulem where mortals and the undead mixed. They were spotted by some employed looking mortal that shuffled them around from floor to bar and then to a booth so generously sized and centrally located that it felt a little redundant to have a sign stating it was for VIP only. Beyond the velveteen rope of this exclusive section were a dozen vampires and a dozen more mortals, all with designers clothes and limbs loose from drink and drugs. He scanned the seats for anyone familiar, having sat with Mia as she poured over analogue tome that she had been tasked with digitizing. They blurred together though, all the women with their faces contoured to match and the men wearing the same three variations of the same three outfits. He could not pick one out by name if he had needed to, the lights and sounds of the club demanding so much of his senses he felt deaf and blind long before the first drink of the night was thrust into his hand.

Kit was thirty one now, a somewhat terrifying age if he thought too much about it but one that was well earned. His interest in the excess that the other mortals were currently reveling had burned off with age, though in them he could the same spirit that had coaxed him down from the hills of the Mirelands and down to the shining city, and after than across the ocean to the brightest beacon of Unified Laurentia. He thought of what Mia had said about charming boys and then disappearing into the dawn. Women in strappy dresses teetered and toppled into laps of young men who hoped they would not do the latter without them but knew that they would. Sloane and Jasna melted into this without hesitation, making introductions and finding drinks in their hands strong enough that one coughed as she took a generous first sip. A pang of unease struck Kit suddenly and he reached to brush his hand against Mia’s.

She flinched at his touch and did not thread her fingers between his as she would so often do when he was feeling anxious. Only then did he realize that she had not spoken a word since they had left the car. He lean down to look her in the face.

“Layout’s changed.” she said without tone

“Pardon?”

“City….city records had, um,” she took a deep breath as if those few words had used up all the air in her lungs “Doors, in and out.”

Kit, straightened up, looking over heads at the edges of the space for exit doors. He had learned Mia’s habit in the first weeks of meeting her, a necrologist who used her access to the Rockefeller archives to make sure that she did not enter a room without knowing her options for an exit “Okay. We can deal with this. Every building has exits because of fire code, yeah? We can ask the waitstaff.”

“I don’t- I don’t know the waitstaff.”

“It’s okay, we can trust them. Mia, hey, Mia look at me.” Kit put himself in front of her but her makeup rimmed eyes looked through him into the middle distance. Her face was beginning to pucker up in the way that would have made him think she was on the verge of crying if he had ever known her to express an emotion in such a way.

“I have to-” she took another shuddering breath “Find.”

“Mia. It’s okay. You’re okay.”

“No, I am not.” she made a hoarse sound like someone trying to laugh without air.

Kit was doing his best, she thought, a friend trying to bring her back down to ground when she seemed somewhere else, but Mia did not want to be present. Awareness had been working against her since they crossed the bridge. It had made her feel her dagger’s absence so strongly that she had clasped one hand to her ankle as if it had just tumbled away. The silver blade had not traveled with her to Angulem this night, instead it had stayed on a recessed shelf of her cube, one within arm’s reach of the bed she was moving further away from with every passing moment in the strangely luxurious SUV.

The dagger had been the only thing she had took with her when they had come to take young Mia away from the only home she had ever known. She slept with it tucked between her box spring and mattress, and when she had heard the noise downstairs her small had had wrapped reflexively around it’s hilt. She had slipped it into the waistband of her cotton pajamas as she crept to the door, out of the shared bedroom where the other two girls slept undisturbed, and close to the bannister of the stairs where she positioned herself to defend the rest of the children for whatever monstrous thing was coming for them.

Someone had jostled Mia on her way out of the VIP section, and the mortals and undead that were packed together and moving in ways that she could not anticipated knocked into her at every turn. She pushed herself towards a wall, black painted and satin looking with a sheen of the same moisture that clung to skin. Shoulders caught hers and spun her around as she tried to track a space that had not been built in accordance to the documents filed in the city records, elbows lifted and jabbed with the music until the moment Mia’s shaking fingers felt the metal bar of a fire exit and pushed on it with all her might.

Cool air hit her face. Her eyes looked outwards just long enough to know she was in the sodium vapor lit alley behind Davidović’s Laundry and then she doubled over. She could cry, she could vomit, she could had screamed if her lungs were working right but they were not. Her senses, trained and attuned, were failing her. Like a control room launched into panic by a false alarm, data came in but no one manned the stations that could interpret the jumbled information. Breath came in but in too short of gasps, and on each exhale it felt like she was losing more and more oxygen and approaching a blackout. Mia was hyperventilating.

She force air into her lungs, pulling until she thought that she really might vomit on the asphalt at her feet. It was nauseating but she did it again, and then a third time and a fourth. She closed her eyes and crossed her arms over her head as she wrenched herself upright, demanding her body didn’t do this to her again. 

“Jedan,” she breathed the first number out before taking another breath “dva, tri, četiri, pet, šest, sedam, osam, devet, deset.” 

Each number was separated by an inhale and said with the exhale. Like an announcement over the control room loudspeaker, her senses began to return to their stations.Around her the presence of reality became not so overwhelming. 

Mia could make out the rhythm in the thudding bass behind her and when a municipal vehicle rumbled past at the end of the alley she had an idea of the size of it without having to look. Where she stood smelled like the back of a bar; the sweet stink of discarded drinks, frying oil and pizza on the breeze, and the permeating perfume of all the cigarettes that had ever been smoked between the high brick walls. When she could open her eyes again she saw, stood at the very end of the alley where it became a road, a bald man who looked as if he had been genetically engineered to be a bodyguard. His neck-less head was turned towards where the young woman who burst out of the fire door a minute ago, but his gaze was fixed on the other presence stood between the bricks. 

Caught off guard by the bang of a door feet away from where he had stepped to smoke, the other occupant of the alley had not yet returned his cigarette from his hand to his lips after ashing it. It hovered midway there, pinched between the tattooed fingers of a smoker who had forgotten about his favorite vice as Mia had stumbled out. She looked at him now, his face frozen for a moment with wide eyes and parted lips before remember himself. He popped the cigarette back into his mouth and somewhat clumsily pawed at his crimson brocade jacket, reaching into the wrong pocket momentarily before he found what he was looking for. Slightly crushed and tattered on one corner like he had picked at the paper, he produced the pack he had been smoking from that night, pushed the top off with his thumb, and wordlessly offered Mia a smoke.


	10. The Alley Behind Davidović’s Laundry

“Thanks.” Mia said, her hand getting out its last tremble as she plucked a cigarette from the pack that the Brat Prince had tipped in her direction. She had half expected them to be held in some gold or leather bound case made all the more expensive by a designer name embossed into it, instead they were in the same branded cardboard that lined the shelves of every radnja in Rockefeller. The same could be said for his lighter, baby pink and with the safety pried off, he cupped his hand around the flame and bent down to Mia’s level until she got an ember burning.

“Don’t mention it.” he said, straightening up, his gaze not wavering from her flushed face as he returned both items to an interior pocket

“If um, just if you see a lanky stringbean looking fuck with a Mirelands accent inside,  don’t actually mention to him that I’m smoking.”

“Sure, yeah.”

Mia took a long drag and felt the last of her nerves return to a more manageable state “I don’t usually do that, you know, book it out of clubs like I’ve never seen a crowd before.”

“You don’t?” he asked with the slightest smile of humor on his face

“No. That would be like, super weird.”

“Guess I’m super weird then.”

“Oh! I didn’t mean to imply that y-” she stopped as he made a motion as if there was no need to apologize. “Shit. I’m really not doing well with first impression thing am I?”

“You wanna start over?”

She rolled her eyes “Maybe uh, could you maybe not look at me for a seconds?”

He nodded a confirmation and looked up towards the starless sky. It had been a night of nerves for Mia. What had started as knock-kneed jitters like a fawn first standing had given way to the frantic, darting panic of a frightened animal as something she could never quite stifled came for her like a car comes to spilt a doe’s body open across the road. It had passed though, a deer across the pavement in time now standing with its dark eyes blinking in the grass. A wave of exhaustion passed over Mia as she stood in front of the Prince. It was not so much a tiredness as it was an acknowledgement of resources spent. Since she had woken up that morning the day had asked her for thing after thing after thing, and now, after she had caught her breath again had had enough of being asked for things without being given what she wanted in return.

The Brat Prince licked his lips and shifted his weight from one leg to the other, and Mia was close enough to where he was leaned against the bricks that she could have touched her hand to his hip if she had wanted to. She did want to. In the alley behind Davidović’s Laundry she allowed herself a moment to forget work and obligation, the great turning gears of Rockefeller and the past and perhaps the future too. Mia thought only of the crest of his hip against her palm, she thought of her hand with finger splayed running up his chest, she thought of how the muscles of his neck pressed against the skin and what a simple yet demanding desire she had to touch him and be touched in return.

“He your boyfriend?” the Prince asked, blowing his cigarette smoke into the air “The stringbean fucker?”

“No.” Mia scoffed “Kit’s just my friend, well, also my roommate but, I don’t want him to know I’m smoking because you know, his wishes matter to me, but he’s not my boyfriend.”

“Hmm.” he nodded “Do you want him to be?”

“No, that’s not a thing.”

“Because you already have a boyfriend?”

“No, I just….don’t like him like that. I don’t like anyone like that.”

“Got it.” the Brat Prince seemed to mull this over “Can I look at you now?”

“Um, well, uh,” she hesitated. If his gaze came back level with hers he would be looking her in the eye again, and Mia was not sure if her composure could survive this after such a transparent line of questioning

“Am I making your nervous?” he asked without moving his chin back down, though the grin that pushed dimples into his cheeks was clear from any angle

“Šuti.” she rolled her eyes again

The Prince fake gasped “Is that any way to talk to nasljednik?”

“Šuti, Vaša Milost.”

He laughed “Stoney. People gotta knock it off with that Vaša Milost shit. I ain’t nobody’s grace and I don’t got a whole new name just for no one to call me it.”

“Alright, yeah. Stoney.” 

“Say it again.”

“What?”

“My name,” he was looking level with her now “say it again.”

“Stoney.” she said, wondering what inflection he had been looking for. She had given him none, thinking that if the Prince was testing his subject for obedience he would have to be more firm with her than that. “What’s my name?”

“It’s Mia.”

“You should remember that.”

“Oh yeah? Why?”

“Because,” she said “No one’s been able to get an interview out of you for the past five years. I want you to remember the name of the necrologist who’s going to.”

A wicked grin spread across Stoney’s face “You had that line prepared or you make it up right here on the spot?”

“I’m just….I’m just stating facts.”

“Oh are you?” he continued to smile as he took a step forward, the motion so swift and decisive that Mia could not help but take one back in return. Two more steps and the Prince was across the alley, the necrologist shuffle backwards until there was wall behind her. Stoney leaned forward and rested a hand on the bricks above her. Mia’s knees were doing a great service holding her up, a fawn again, all impulse filled and looking at what she wanted with a nervous aching. He could see as he searched her face. 

Not one to relinquish so easily, she stood at her full height. Even in a pair of heels her eye level did not rise above the Prince’s collarbone, but Mia’s presence had never relied on her stature. It did not take a silver dagger or even a step forward to move the Brat Prince back either. Instead she turned her face up towards him and met his eye with a gaze that did not waver despite the way her heart was pounding. Stoney’s smile tightened along with a muscle in his jaw, he took a drag of his cigarette, and then stepped back until his boots were planted on the pavement in the middle of the alley.

“I am.” she said, letting the distance between them linger “because this is my night off and I’ve been so busy every other time that my character in Rub Univerzuma has been in stasis since last weekend, and if I don’t log on for a mission soon I’m going to fucking, dust myself for being such a deadbeat crew member, so you’re going to make me coming out tonight worth it.”

“You play Rub Univerzuma?”

“Yeah.” she said and watched as something in the Prince’s demeanor change. 

She had caught him off guard when she had banged into the alley all hectic and breathless, but as quickly as she had regained her composure he had returned to the cool disposition that had earned him the title of Brat. His questions, how ever flirtatious, had been too glib to feel like anything more than someone covering themselves. It had been some months since he was publicly involved with a woman but the last had been with a vampiress called Apolline, who had stepped down from the passenger side of one of his cars with a telling expression and into the home of her fiancé Valerius. In the coming weeks Valerius had discovered a sudden and unrelenting passion for mixed martial arts. 

Now, something was different. He stood across from in the alleyway, smoking the last puffs of cigarette from the pack with a tattered edge, one hand in the pants pocket of a custom tailored designer suit that was worn over the type of sleeveless undershirt one could buy in three packs from the grocery store. In his face and his posture he had dropped some affectation and thought she could not tell exactly what it was that he had stripped away, Mia knew who it was that she was looking at now.

“That’s my favorite game. The whole franchise is….fire.” 

“Yeah. I started with the first Rub Univerzuma, then I played RU: Destiny, RU: Outer Discovery, I unfortunately played all the way through Univerzuma Origins and I can never get that time back, and now RU: Beyond Oblivion is literally the only thing I think about.”

“You hear about the new side missions?”

“Eh, sort of,” she shrugged and allowed herself to tip back so that her shoulderblades were rested on the wall. “They’re all in Praxis System and I’m not playing in there anymore, so,”

“You ain’t?”

“Nuh-uh, I’m bobbing around the Pyrrole System nowadays. I barely spent any time in Praxis when I first started. I skipped the tutorial and even if I hadn’t the only reason to spend more than a dozen hours of gameplay there is if you suck so much you can’t get a ship out.”

“Oh, yeah, yeah totally.” 

“Stoney?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you stuck in Praxis?”

The Brat Prince scoffed and shook his head. He looked down and mumbled something and then moved his arms in a motion that was just as vague, “Dunno.”

“You don’t know?” she said, bending down slightly to get in his sight line as he stared at his shoes “Or do you….suck at video games?”

“I don’t!”

“Oh, defensive!”

“Why are you smiling!”

“Because it’s funny.”

“I don’t suck! I just think an open world action-adventure survival game should be, I dunno, I wanna see the other systems.”

“Oh no. Don’t tell me you’re one of those guys on the message board that’s all butthurt because you kicked some money into the fundraiser and you think ‘it’s a game for the fans by the fans’ or whatever. You could’ve given them a million and still no one is obligated to make their art the way you like it.”

“Half.”

“Half what?”

“You said a million. I gave them five hundred thous.”

“Oh.”

“So I wanna see all the systems.”

“Yeah, uh.” she lifted her cigarette to her mouth and took in a lungful of smoke before speaking again “I can’t really fathom how much money that actually is but uh, you’re still bad at video games, I think.”

“I’m not!” he took his phone out and started tapping at the screen “You near a training ground portal out there in Pyrrole?”

“I can get to one.”

“I sent you an invite.”

“Oh, you want me to kick your ass so I can confirm that I’m better at video games than you? Is that what you’re into? Getting your ass kicked in a game you funded? Because it’s weird but I can work with that.”

“Šuti,” he glanced up from his phone and then back at it “My grill cheese is here.”

“Your grilled cheese is where?”

“Here. C’mon,” he jerked his head towards the door “We can split it if you want.”

“I don't uh, I don't really eat dairy."

Stoney's eyes narrows and he looked at her for a long moment before asking "You some kind of alien or something?"

"No, I just...." she trailed off "Listen, you're the one ordering a grilled cheese to a club."

"So? What about it?"

"That's way more alien, and maybe not allowed? If it’s not against an actual rule it has to be like, some kind of agreed upon things that people don’t do.”

“Maybe,” he shrugged “but, Mia,”

“Yeah?”

“I’m the Brat Prince. I don’t give a shit about the rules.”


	11. Užasno Djeca

Post-Integration vampires existed in a state of constant excess. At one point in the night the Prince had assessed the table cluttered with half drunk bottles of champagne, vodka, and rajika, and decided they looked lonely; a dozen more appeared in his section minutes later. He had come in with Mia, a step behind her with his eyes looking at the curve of her spine as if he wanted to place his hand there but didn’t dare. Kit’s lips had curved into a slight smile against the bottle of beer he had raised to it, he was not the biggest fan of the arrogant and entitled young royal, and to see that Mia had put him in his place within their first interaction reminded him why he had admired the spitfire necrologist from the day they had met. 

Introduction had been made, Mia stating her profession as if she was there to be assessed on her credentials instead of what she was really there for, which was to drink strong cocktails of bourbon and apricot brandy one someone else’s tab. A vampire whose eyes seemed to never focus on anything in particular had mouthed the names of the new additions as if doing some memory exercise, but looked as if he was caught entirely off guard when it came time for him to introduce himself as Kofi. A mortal young woman in a dressed that seemed to be made of liquid came up from the dance floor as they were all exchanging names and handshakes. She stepped up on a low table and stumbled across before landing in someone’s lap.

“I’m Sapphire.” she said

“Yeah Saph, I know who you are.”

“Ahhhh!” she screamed and laughed at the same time, then turned to address the rest of the group “You guys! Brando is here! He’s not sad anymore!”

“Mm,” the vampire called Brando tilted his head as if this was only half right

“I’m so glad you’re here! This is the best birthday!” she continued “I’m so old though! I’m older….I’m older than Cae? No…. Stop it! Now you’re making me sad!”

“I didn’t say nothing!” he threw up his hands

Sapphire gave him a thump on his breathless chest and then continued on talking to him with all the vigor and frenzy of someone who had probably had enough drugs for the night.

At one point in the evening a long and lanky vampire with bleached blond hair and a colorful map of tattoos hiding just under his cufflinks proposed a drinking game that wasn’t really a drinking game as it was a college campus spawned game of chance. It had various names but alumni of Friedan called it V or V, the first standing for the vodka that was in all but one shot glass, and the second standing for the distilled white vinegar some unfortunate soul would end up shooting as if it was liquor. 

“That’s Flint,” Sloane said to Jasna, glancing back at her more experienced coworker as if to verify that she had this right “He’s from the Dobrogost clan, their territory’s in Little Serbia. His progenitor is broodmates with Ljiljana’s landlord.”

“So like, his vampire uncle, his vunckle.” 

Mia leaned over “Actually it’s his vaunt. Landlady.”

“Is he post-Integration too?” Kit asked

“Not officially,” Sloane answered “But the Integration happened not even five years after he was turned, at even then large scale hunting was virtually unheard of anywhere other than plateau pocket communities like Hopkins and Edelstadt, even ones like Stoughton were aware of the way the world was changing.”

Mia nodded a confirmation but said nothing further on the subject that she was something of an expert on. Instead she looked up at the server who brought a tray cluttered with two dozen shot glasses of clear liquid and then back at the vampire that had invited them there and who had introduced himself as Prince Stoney. They were surprisingly cozy for two people who had just met. Throughout the night they had spoken mostly too each other, with only small asides to contribute to the surrounding conversations and explain to Kit where a grilled cheese and side of fries had inexplicably appeared from. 

They sat almost like two people who had known each other for a long time, with the casual posture reserved for broken in sofas and papasan chairs. Mia sat pretzel legged with her ankles against her thighs, while the Prince sat in what could be described as the most inefficient way possible. He was turned completely sideways in the booth to face Mia, one long leg tucked up close to his body and the other stretched out to rest the sole of his boot on the edge of one of the tables. The arm that was not holding his drink was slung up along the top of the backrest, his head tilted onto his bicep as he listened to the necrologist. When Flint had called for the game Stoney had groaned and unfolded himself into a normal, forward facing posture. 

“Alright, ladies and gentlemen,” the officiating vampire said, standing up in the seat and clasping his hands around part of the chandelier above so he could lean his sinewy body over the table as he ran the game “Everybody grab your shots, you know how it goes.”

Mia leaned forward, lifting up on her knees and shins. The position had allowed  her to hold her ankles at a more natural angle while wearing heels, though it also greatly reduced her already questionable balance when the tray of shots had been place just out of her arms’s reach. She chose an indistinct glass from the tray with one hand and used the other to steady herself on the thing nearest to her range. Stoney’s loose posture had gone straight backed with surprise when this stabilizer had been his knee.

“Sorry, did I startle you?” she asked as she leaned back with her shot

“No, nah, it’s cool.” he glanced quickly and the open palm that was still rested on his leg even though she was sitting flat again. 

“It wasn’t even a Move, I’m just very short.”

“Oh, it wasn’t?”

“No.” she slid her hand up from knee to thigh and gave a small squeeze “This is a Move.”

Stoney opened his mouth to say something but did not have the chance to, as Flint saw that the glasses were all claimed and raised his up.

“Živjeli!” he toasted

The rest of them followed suit “Živjeli!”

Sharp in the kind of familiar way that she did not feel until it was already down, vodka tipped out of Mia’s glass and down her throat. She looked at Sloane and Jasna and Kit, who despite an assortment of blinking and slightly wincing expressions, had all clearly made it past the first round. 

There were four in total. As collegiate as the game’s practice was it had its roots in old lore. It had been good fortune for mortals to drink together for as long as there had been such things as mortality, luck, and alcohol. Around the same time, it was said, the dark plane had come in contact with ours, breaking through somewhere in Dinaridi Planine and leaking four horrors into the mortal world. 

The first were galloping creatures with great muscular bodies on spindle legs, heads as big as a man’s torso and black eyes that could be looking into to find that there was nothing but an endless emptiness inside them. After the horses had come the hounds, they were massive black beasts with snarling teeth and eyes that burned with hellfire. Third had been demons, incorporeal vermin that feasted on doubt and shame and regret like mice feasted on a bag of quick oats left open on a pantry shelf; if one were too look under their shroud hoods it was said there were no eyes at all. The final horror was so microscopically small that mortals had thought it magic until they built machines to see it. Upir lyssavirus, called the bane in common speech, could be seen best when it lived inside of a host; an undead with a sharpened grin, clay-cold skin, and eyes that caught the light and shined back.

The drinking game had started off as a ritual, each shot done together meant to ward off one of the four, and the dummy drink serving some purpose that a convert like Mia could never quite commit to memory. It took on a certain kind of irony when it was played by one of the very horrors it was designed against. Shot glasses were drained and a moment after Mia had checked in with her friends the was a screech of displeasure from someone further down in the section. She shudder in her strappy neon dress with the mesh accents and reached desperately for the cocktail straw of her drink. The vinegar shot had gone to Calli, a mildly influential mortal influencer/model who posted carefully edited photos for her followers and coordinated brand deals all from a phone with a crack running through its screen. 

There was barely a paused between the first and second round, and when done it had been in such haste that it seemed everyone expected their shot to contain the vinegar and wanted to get it down quick. The Brat Prince thudded his empty glass on the table at the same time as a vampire called Wesson gagged and swore. Mia leaned forward with her elbows on her knees, the second shot feeling more potent when the first one hadn’t gotten the chance to settle yet.

“You cool?” Stoney asked her, his chin nearly touching her shoulder so he could use the softened tone he been speaking to her in since they sat

“Yeah, yeah.” she nodded “I think the vodka shots are a real cherry on top in making me feel seventeen again. Though I’m going to need some obnoxious blue hair dye and directions to the nearest Burek Express if I want to make this a really classic club experience.”

“How’d you get into clubs like this when you was seventeen?”

“Lying, obviously.”

Stoney laughed and leaned back “Blue?”

“What?”

“You hair was blue before-” he made a motion along his temple like long hair being shorn off “before the buzz?”

“Yeah. Well, it was a lot of colors; cobalt, turquoise, indigo, baby blue, aqua, I don’t think I used the same color twice. Then at one point I tried to do cotton candy pink for some fucking reason without really stripping the aqua, so it just turned like….dirty mauve, and that got covered up with a dark purple. I kept that up until the big chop.”

“Why’d you cut it?”

“Because my hair was fucking crispy with the amount of damage I did to it. I did a lot of things to my body when I was younger and literally none of them were good.”

Stoney’s brow creased “Why?”

“Do you want the fun answer or the other one?”

“What’s the fun answer?”

“Because I was a riot and rebel and no one could tell me what to do.”

“Are you still a rebel?”

“I still have weird hair if that’s what you’re asking.”

He smiled “I like your weird hair.”

“Thanks.”

“It looks cool, like a lady boxer or something.”

“I can’t box for shit.” she said “I’m better with blade weapons than hand to hand.”

“Like swords?” he asked, a genuine excitement perking him up for the first time since the liquor had made him relaxed and languide 

“Um, well, more daggers and knives….I’m not half bad with an axe but I’m very out of practice, but uh, I mean I don’t see why I wouldn’t do well in a swordfight.”

“That’s so fucking cool. What are you doing here? You should be in….the Free Republic or something, riding horses and cutting down rival outlaws.”

“The wild west is a revisionist fantasy.”

“I don’t know what that means but you’re really pretty.”

Mia rolled her eyes at this and rested her head on the cushioned back of the booth. She had been pretty since puberty; it was a simple fact that he was no more special than any other guy for happening to observe, but this did not stop her heart from thumping against her chest like it had something to prove “Say it again.”

“You’re really pretty and I wonder what you’d do if I kissed you right now?”

“I’d probably kiss you back.”

“I like that answer.” he smiled and took a sip from his glass of rajika. When he put it down he was still smirking, but made no motion to do anything else with his grinning lips.

“Are you going to do it?”

“Do what?”

“Kiss me.”

“You want me to kiss you?” he raised his eyebrows and point to his own chest, feigning surprise as if she had been the one to bring it up “Is that what you’re asking me to do?”

“You’re the one that asked me!”

“Nuh-uh,” he stifled a laugh “That’d be a….um….ah, jebote, what’s the thing where I’m real powerful like, and uh….abuse of power!”

“Light Above.” she rolled her eyes “Are you this polite to all the girls you make out with in clubs when you’re fucking drunk?”

“I don’t gotta be polite if you don’t want me too.” his playful grin took on an air of something else that felt too revealing for a room full of people

“Well, you are the Brat Prince. I’d expect a bit of panache.”

“Why you keep using words I don’t know?” 

“I don’t know?” she shrugged “You should know more words. It’s not my problem your vocabulary is shit.”

“You know when I said you was pretty? I meant pretty mean.”

“Damn right I am. Are you going to do something about it?”

“Maybe I am.”

The Brat Prince’s parted lips had curled into a grin and for a moment their booth had lit up with some errant beam from the dance floor, illuminating his face so clearly that Mia could see the faint striations from where the ban had pushed blunt mortal teeth into fangs. The same light had shaken Flint from his distraction and he bellowed a call of action from his narrow chest.

“Round three, fuckers!”

The distraction had been a young woman named Stasia who was indistinguishable from Calli unless you looked her in the face or noted that her dress was hot pink and not highlighter green. She had caught Flint’s attention and he had turned to her, still standing on the seat and with such a hip forward stance that it boarded on exhibitionistic. When the game resumed it had done so poorly for Jasna, who had made a cringing whine as the vinegar went down and climbed over the back of the booth to go stare at a toilet bowl for a few minutes until the nausea passed. 

When the fourth and final round of shots arrived at the table it was to a raucous amount of activity. Though the liquor had not yet filtered into bloodstreams they were already possessed by it, hands and limbs scrambling over each other like buzzards clearing a corpse. Mia picked her shot and slumped back, her shoulderblade meeting Stoney’s chest and causing the glass of clear liquid to slosh up over the edge and onto her hand.

“Ah!” she squealed as Flint instructed them to shoot “It’s vinegar!”

“Shoot it!” the lanky vampire insisted while the rest of them rabbled in agreement

“I can’t! I can’t!” she had begun to laugh, knowing that she would have to but hiding her face in Stoney’s side anyway.

He reached and arm around back of her as the rest of the section hooted and howled, wrapping his hand around hers and directing the glass away from the table she was trying to return it too. For a moment Mia though he was going raise it to her mouth but instead he brought the glass up to his own lips, downing it with a face as sour as the liquid.

“Ugh,” he said, and then turned away to burp

The uproar over this rulebreak was instantaneous. If the club had been putting up with the rowdy section until now it seemed they were determined to press their luck. A barrage of cocktail straws, napkins, dripping ice cubes, and alcohol soaked garnishes rained down on the Brat Prince. He spread his arms to reveal in the assault before turning his hands up and responding with a pair of middle fingers and a toothy grin. Security had stopped by to issue them a warning minutes later.


	12. A LED Night Sky

Mia woke up the the theater room of   Dwell™, a beanbag furniture stocked space that residents could book for up to three hours at a time. Between her and Kit they had claimed it for six, and spent an extra hour sleeping before they had to leave to make room for a group that wanted to marathon a seasons of a decade old sitcom that day. A resident named Dyler has switched on the light and looked at the four sleeping in the theater as if to scold them for using the space between the gym and laundry as their personal sleepover room. Jasna had gone to raise her middle finger before Kit had pushed it down diplomatically. 

“Sorry, sorry, we’ll be out in a second.” Kit said

Dyler gave them a grumbling look before moving his friends and girlfriend over to the counter with the popcorn machine and slushie churn as they waited for the room to clear.

The ceiling above Mia was made of dark acoustic felt with points of LED lights popped through at calculatedly random points to make it look like some facsimile of the night sky. There was something to be said for the decor choice in a city that bleed so much light into the atmosphere there was no real blackness with which to view the actual stars. She had laid down in a plush patterned sack of fabric and polystyrene beans and fallen asleep immediately, doing so in the kind of instant way that meant when she woke it was with a feeling of being unrested and like she had not moved her neck in seven hours.

She rubbed her face and came back with all the residue that the drunken scrubbing of a makeup wipe left behind, and then reached for her phone.

“Ugh, why do I have work emails!” she lamented, clearing notifications from her social media and messaging apps and ones that alerted her to sales and side jobs “It’s Saturday. Why won’t people stop emailing me on the weekends.”

“Because capitalism is a prison that we cannot escape.” Jasna said as she stood up

“You sound like Dušan.”

“Maybe Dušan has the right idea.”

“He never has the right idea.” Mia said, and opened another app to see what had been sent to esinamiawhitt@dana.com, “Oh shit, Anto sent me a pre-publish.”

“Anto like writes for the Order Anto?” 

Mia nodded slightly and looked at the picture attached to the email. It was of Stoney, which was largely unremarkable given how many times a covertly positioned journalist had snapped a picture of him slumping and shuffling around outside some Rockefellian haunt just before sun up, but it was of Mia too. Their voyeur had caught her mostly from behind, so that her appearance was primarily of shaved short hair and exposed skin. Her jacket was off in the warm air of a summer night and slung over her arm, and she was standing close to Stoney, wrists draped over his shoulders and his hands pressed into the tan skin of her waist. The angle had not caught her smile, or her face at all, but she had been grinning when it was taken because she had not been able to keep her expression cool while the Prince’s forehead was leaned against hers.

Still, Mia’s nose wrinkled at the image. She disliked most pictures of her taken without her knowledge, but was particularly off put by one that seemed to highlight how her pear shaped figure had softened and swelled like an overripe fruit as she had eased into her mid-twenties. 

“Publishing in an hour.” Mia read the short message aloud “Out of my control. Thought you should know.”

“Damn,” Sloane said “Mr. Ice Cold still looking out for his favorite intern.”

Anto Herjavec, sender of the email, was a necrologist in his late forties who’s hair had been peppered with grey even when Mia had interned under him four years prior. He was a serious man, with a sobering voice and a trust that had to be earned. Mia had liked this about him, and though she had learned little from her sixth months stint with the Order, she had like Anto enough that he had learned the floral tattoo down her spine well enough that he had been able to recognize it in the photo that passed over his coworker’s desk.

“Yeah,” she said quietly, more in her thoughts than the  Dwell™ theater room

Kit had stood and stretched and taken a moment to fix the hair that would overwhelm his thin face if it was not tied back. Soon he would be going upstairs, back to his own bed or further up to tend to his plants on the roof and work on the screenplay that when finished would apparently be his ticket out of his unsatisfying human resources job. For now though he was checking in on Mia again, a job he was not looking for a way out of.

“Do you feel okay about this?”

“Hmm? Yeah.” she blinked “I mean, I don’t know but I guess I kind of have to be. Like Anto said, it’s out of my control. It is weird though, usually it’s just my name at the bottom of a DANA piece, this is the Order and it’s my body.”

“Hey, Kit,” Jasna said from the doorway she was already mostly out of “Come upstairs with me, operating that weird ass coffeemaker of yours is a two person job.”

He glanced at Mia, who gave him a nod of permission, and he was off to she Jasna how the hot beverage machine worked for the fifteenth time. Sloane was a slow riser, having been limp in a beanbag during this exchange, but now rolled over, and rolled again, and a few more times until she was close enough to Mia that she could speak to her without raising her voice above it’s current sleepy volume.

“What up what up what up?” she said “How’s your head?”

“Not as sore as it could be, but I also haven’t stood upright yet so, who knows.”

“That’s what’ll get you.”

Mia shifted and a second later took out the small hard thing that was pressing against her from her pocket. It was a single earring with a jewel that caught the overhead lights in a way that neither of them saw in person very often. “Look what Stoney gave me.”

“That’s a real diamond.” Sloane said, taking it and tapping it against her front teeth to verify what they already knew “He just gave you the one?”

“He said he saw it in a movie.”

“Stupid.” she handed it back and rolled over “Well, there’s a pawn shop between here and my Metro stop if you want me to take care of it for you.”

“Sloane!”

“What? You’re not going to keep it are you?” she scoffed “What are you going to do with it? Cherish it as a treasured keepsake of the time a drunk rich dude paid attention to you? Get real. Pay your rent, catch up on your student loans, buy a steak, whatever, but don’t fucking keep it like it matters.”

Mia held the earring in her closed fist, pressing her knuckles to her lips as she thought “Is it….doesn’t it feel kind of….”

“Kind of what? Economical? Listen, if you want to keep it for a few days that’s whatever, it’s probably the only diamond you’ll ever own, but don’t….you’d say the same thing to me Mia, girls like us can’t afford to be sentimental.”


	13. A Waste of a Pretty Face

“Keysee Boskov-Rohl. Nineteen. Official residence is a town in northern Black Dirt but was taking a summer session here at Rockefeller University. Estimated time of death; Friday around four am. Estimated time of resurrection; between one and two am on Saturday. Recorded time of argentment and subsequent discontinuation; two thirteen am.”

Mia leaned back in one of the kinetic chairs of a WorkSpace™ meeting room, looking up at the slatted ceiling through which the acoustic panels they were meant to mask could be clearly seen. It was Sunday and a girl was dead. She had gotten a message from Mads to come in on her day off, and after reluctantly telling Ela that both she and Sloane would be missing brunch, made her way into Angulem for the unfortunate affair. 

“Any collaterals?” she asked with her head still tilted back as she balance in a seat with a ball for a bottom instead of legs.

“Three non-criticals.” Brint read from the screen of an electronic tablet as Mads skimmed the initial report over the assistant’s cardigan clad shoulder. “Two had only superficial injuries that were treated on site.”

“And the third?” she asked, turning her cell phone over in her hand

“Set to be discharged from Curie Medical Center later today. The resurrected got some teeth in him, lost a bit of blood and needed stitches but a full recovery is expected. His name is….Miles Csonka. Um….twenty one, resident of Rockefeller, also lived in the dorm where the attack took place.”

“Mads is going to want us to talk to him.” she said, now righting herself and looking at the small meeting of DANA that included everyone expect for the very woman who the Docton Agency of Necrological Archivery was named for. “Where is she anyway?”

“Traffic.” 

“Of course.” Sloane said from the support beam she was leaning against in the open office, her height all wrong for the ergonomic design of the kinetic chair. “Csonka sounds like it’ll be a one and done thing. Are you good going solo on that one, Mia?”

“Yeah, why?” she asked and took out her notebook. She had passed the pages of banners and doodle succulents drawn with fine line marker like Taylee had taught them during her bullet journalling night, and found only blank dot-grid paper before her as she wrote down Miles Csonka’s name.  “Are you trying to skip this case?”

“Not at all. I want to investigate who did this.”

“Did what?” Brint said, looking up from her tablet

“Killed her.”

“The cause of mortal death was the overd-”

“I mean who it was that shot her full of silver.”

“Oh! Um, Colt Draper was the name provided.”

“What was he doing there? Is he a student?”

“No, um, his girlfriend is a student and resident in the dorms. Boskov-Rohl’s roommate actually. He said….” she scrolled further down in the initial report “he said he was at the site of the attack because his girlfriend Sofie hadn’t packed her reusable water bottle and she needed it for the music festival they were going to, so he doubled back to get it for her.”

“With a gun on him?”

Mia shared a look with Sloane “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking it’s been a few years since I’ve gone to a festival but ‘gun with a chamber full of silver’ was never on my list of things I needed to pack.”

“Voting for Reardon Breit isn’t on your anything list but if the reaction to his mayoral bid is any indication, your opinion isn’t ubiquitous. People are bringing guns all sorts of places now that the LDF has everyone thinking they’re under this constant threat. You know they’re going to spin this story into some alarmist justification for their hate group.”

“That’s why I want to investigate this Draper kid. All of these attacks have been way too convenient to the LDF’s narrative, and listen, I’m not saying I judge people based on their names, Esinamia Whitt, but Colt Draper sounds exactly like the kind of dude that would manifest his white male victim complex in ult-nat ideology.”

“To be fair, me having a name that sounds like I was raised on the plateau by people who thought vampires didn’t have souls, does, actually, check out.” she said as she flipped over the cell phone resting on her thigh and saw there were no new notification since the last time she had checked the small screen “But I also don’t think you’re going to find anything on Draper other than some run of the mill bigoted nationalism with a sprinkle of androcentrism. And I bet you anything Mads isn’t going to let you allot more than a single interview to it. The case is about Boskov-Rohl, not your blood poison plot conspiracy.”

“It’s not a conspiracy and I’ll take your bet. If I manage to convince Mads to let me do a full investigation on this dude who is technically, legally, a murderer and should be in jail for shooting a girl, then you have to convince her to have weekly informal meetings, you know, ones with some light snacks, maybe some, I don’t know, cured meats….”

“Sloane.” Mia said “Mads isn’t going to expense charcuterie, ever, for any assignment. If you want fancy ham you’re going to have to buy it yourself.”

“A bet’s a bet girlie. You said anything and that includes jamón ibérico.” she said “On the topic of eating. I’m going to order some sushi and see if my volcano rolls get here before our boss does. Either of you want to get in on this?”

“I meal prepped.” Brint said

“I didn’t but I had a cevapi stuffed crepe from downstairs and those plantain chips at the snack bar are calling my name.” she stood up and checked her phone again before slipping it into her phone into her pocket “Meeting temporarily adjourned until Mads get here?”

“Yeah. Go get your nasty starch bananas. Have fun eating something that everyone’s touched with their fucking hands, you animal.”

“I will.” she said, walking backwards towards WorkSpace™’s selection of purportedly healthy, staunchly gluten-free snack bar. “Have fun not eating fancy ham.”

“At least I know no one jerked off before touching my food.”

“You one hundred percent don’t know that. You think no one’s ever cranked one out after touching that supple sush all day? You don’t know what’s in that spicy mayo.”

“Hey, Mia,” Sloane grinned at her joke before she said it “Cross cum-tamination.” 

“Disgusting,” still facing her friend she pantomimed the motion of someone vomiting.

 She was committed to her theatrics, so much so that she would have walked into the wall of acrylic snack dispensers if she had not knocked over a wire based counter stool first. The clatter of metal against the polished concrete floor startled a new hire. He had jumped slightly before looking at the young woman who was too busy making jokes about food service workers masturbating into condiments to watch where she was walking. Mia apologized as she righted the stool and slinked over the the sparkling water dispenser as if a few feet of distance would absolve her of the social faux-pas.

The wall of dispensers held not just her coveted plantain chips but kale chips and beet chips and cassava chips. There were mixed nuts and puffed quinoa and organic sprouted pumpkin seeds. In the lower bins there were sheets of seaweed that had been dried and pink himalayan salted, strips of ethically sourced mangos, and what appeared almost like beef jerky but was actually mushrooms sliced and dehydrated much in the same way the mangoes had. The fresh faced new hire regarded the wall much in the way Sloane did, finding the selection interesting but unappealing in its lack of textural variety and potential for having been touched by an unknown number of hands. 

Mia’s taste was not so discerning though. She had been quick to acquiesce to entire meals of dry goods and whatever fruit was around that day, finding it in some vague and distant way reminiscent of the the cavernous dining hall that served the Edelstadt community. The floors there had been concrete too, though she was sure that in WorkSpace™ it was for the minimalist industrial aesthetic and not because they were part of a network of rural community prepping for a war that would never come. It had been different in other ways too; Mia had learned of neither kale nor quinoa until she was relocated the Rockerfeller, and of all the jerky she had eaten she had only ever remembered it to be made out of meat. 

Most of all she remembered the peanut butter, thicker and sweeter than the almond spread that stocked every shelf in Rockerfeller. For nearly two months once a young Mia had fueled herself solely with peanut butter sandwiches. No reason or rationale would sway her through the seven and a half weeks between the time she had gotten sick on serving of beef and rice and the day the new cook had gotten away with ordering a whole block of cheddar cheese to the community. It had been midday at the beginning of the warm season. She could remember being particularly hungry after another attempt at building a bridge across a stretch of the stream that was too deep and frightening for them to wade across with their small bodies. Their failure had sent a boy named Loell tumbling into the water when one of their stacked stone supports toppled, and after a frantic rescue operation the children had collectively decided they were better of eating lunch than engineering. 

The new cook was a young man who had lived in the much larger community of Hopkins before coming to Edelstadt, and brought with him all the recipes enjoyed by town where all the roads were paved and the houses were plumbed. He had taken elbow noodles, which Edelstadt bought in bulk like they did all of their dry goods, and mixed them with a sauce made of melted cheese, which was a novelty to a community that considered butter the kind of luxury that was saved for special occasions. The quite literally named macaroni in cheese had made her as sick as the beef and rice had, but even with her stomach aching she had been glad that the new cook had scribbled for the sharp and stretchy cheese in the margins of the community supply sheet.

“What a day, right?”

“Huh?”

“I said what a day, right?” Locke said, having strolled up beside Mia as she stood in front of the sparkling water dispenser “Working on a Sunday?”

“Oh, yeah, well, a girl died so I probably would have come in anyway.”

“Bummer,” he said and leaned against the counter with an expression that did not match one of someone who had just been told that a young woman was dead “What’s with you and all this vampire stuff anyway?”

“What?”

“I mean, the undead? Yeesh, am I right? If you asked me, it’s kind of sad when someone like you has to associate with that kind.”

“I’m not- I’m not following. Like me how?”

“Bit of a waste of a pretty face, don’t you think?”

“Oh.” she scowled “Oh no, I don’t like this at all.”

“And not just a pretty face,” he continued, looking back at her coworkers “Maybe they don’t appreciate you enough to notice, but I notice you. I’m betting you’re as smart as you are gorgeous, aren’t you?”

“What? Literally everyone here knows I’m smart. I double majored at Friedan, I have a Grenald-Cohn score over three hundred, and I became a senior necrologist at twenty five. It is possibly the most obvious thing about me.” she said, not even looking at Locke as she tilted her phone out of her pocket to see if she had missed the buzz of a notification “Speaking off, I have a case to work on, I don’t even know why I’m talking to you.”

“Maybe you like my company.”

“I truly do not.”

Locke shrugged and smiled, as if this had been some kind of coyness that was open for interpretation “You know, I’d text you back.”

“What?” she followed his nod down to her phone “I- no, it’s not- because I’ve haven’t texted him so he’s not- how do you know it’s a guy, I could be checking the news. Fuck off.”

“Fine.” he pushed himself off the counter, “I just want you to know, that I know, that under this tough girl exterior, you want to be treated like a princess the same as any other girl. Don’t be afraid to know what you’re worth, Mia.”

“The only thing I’m afraid of is maybe breaking the sparkling water dispenser when I drown you in it.”

“You’re not going to fool me with that thorny defense.” he shrugged as he walked back over to wherever tech support was stationed on a Sunday “But I know a rose when I see one.”

Mia twisted one arm back to give him the middle finger while her other hand planted a biodegradable cup on the spill grate of the dispenser with far more force than someone who was simply looking for twelve ounces of sparkling lime essenced water.


	14. Down Below

Masons Market was a spacious, open air shopping mall full of stores in Angulem’s Granite District that, judging by the cup size of the bralettes they sold and the sheerness of their cleanly packaged makeup, were targeted at women whose bodies had not gone through puberty. It was also the kind of place to get bosanska kahva and avocado toast on a late Monday morning when you had had to cancel brunch the day before. Full on coffee and carbs, Mia had slinked around the whitewashed brick interior of one of these stores, wondering if last century’s dock workers ever thought the storehouses would be reopened as a boutique that sold natural lavender deodorant. Several hours ago her Cube by Dwell™’s circadian rhythm aligned wakefulness notification system had informed her that in was counterintuitive to wellness to change one’s rest cycles so suddenly. She had kicked the wall and sworn at the operating system for telling her when she should and shouldn’t be sleeping.

“This is cute.” Ela said, touching a breezy linen shirtdress

Mia looked up from the display of minimalist earrings which were mostly copper wires bent into geometric shapes and displayed on a acacia wood board “Mhm, yeah.”

“Can’t afford it though. Well, I could, but where would I wear it?”

“Um, when your rich date takes you horseback riding in the ocean at sunset?”

Ela rolled her eyes “Honestly, the dream.”

“What? A rich date?”

“No, horseback riding in a flowing white dress.” she said, moving on to a rack of equally ethereal smocks “But I guess we know what’s on your mind.”

“I’m not-” Mia shook her head and shrugged “I’m not.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“No. I don’t want to think about it either.” she said, moving on to another display full of hand-poured soy candles in scents that supposedly correspond to one’s astrological sign.

She had been awake since earlier that morning when, despite her Cube’s dissuasion, Mia had decided to take the Metro into Angulem and walk south from Zimmerman Square stop down to Dandridge Park, the latter location a potter’s field turned urban greenspace around which most of the buildings that made up Rockefeller University’s urban campus were situated. The city was different after an attack. Mortal students walked in groups and cast suspicious glances at every daylit peer and passerby. Mia had been in college herself, several avenues east at Friedan University, when the first of the attacks to raise Rockefeller’s haunches had been reported. A resurrection in a Marina neighborhood called Sanjak had killed two before the morning sun had gotten to the frenzied vampire. One more was killed a few months later in the summer, though it had said the collaterals would have been far higher if an LDF member hadn’t been there to put down the instinct fueled undead. At the start of her next school year a then-record number of five fatalities had been reported after the Scrugg’s Basin attack, and the vampire responsible had been able to slink off into the night before the Living Defense Force could shoot the dissociating creature full of silver.

The student population thinned out by the Granite District. It was a pricier place to exist, and even those who were far from the instant noodle and dollar pita picture of a broke undergrad seemed to lose interest as the street numbers lowered. The neighborhood was for women like Ela who, despite her budget not allowing for a breezy linen shirtdress and minimalist earrings, had been raised with the air of someone who could. Mia had met her friend along the promenade that overlooked the river, where she had thrown her head back and laughed for a soft, sunlit picture to post to the Feed. It had amassed a not insignificant number of likes in the half hour since she had shared it with the social internet. 

“Anything good?” she asked about the candles Mia was raising to her nose

“Eh, Aquarius smells like unsettlingly similar to that protein almond milk stuff I always think isn’t going be the texture of liquid chalk when I buy it.” she said “But yours is kind of nice, it’s pine and blackthorn plum.”

“Hmm,” she thought about the Capricorn candle for a moment “It’s not me though.”

“You mean to tell me all people can’t be sorted into one of twelve categories? You mean to tell me that maybe, possibly, astrology isn’t real?”

Ela rolled her eyes “Is it boring? Only believing in what you can see and touch?”

“It has its pros and cons but at the very least the angle of Uranus doesn’t tell me how my day is going to go.” she shrugged “I’m over this store, though. I feel like an interloper. Do you want to pop down below with me or do you want to stay up here?”

“Do I want to leave pretty, sunny shops to take the world’s creepiest elevator to a dark, damp underground alley of electrical hazards and shipping containers turned into sex shops?”

“It’s not all sex shops. There’s pawn shops too.”

“Well I’m wearing open toe shoes so,” she mimed the shape of the brackish puddles that spotted the understreets. “I’m going to get a green juice at Tallulah’s instead. I’ll meet you on the patio when you’re done with your spooky shit.”

Mia had agreed to this and split off from her friend to take the rickety metal box down to what existed under the wide sunny promenade of the open air market. It had been the dirt under the docks which the piles had been bore into and over the years it had filled up with discarded shipping containers the city had no use for. As the waters had risen a seawall had been built, closing in the space on its only side exposed to the sunlight. The vampires had moved in soon after. Someone had poured asphalt as a path down the middle and someone else had pulled electricity from the grid and hung caged bulb just far enough apart that one was never in complete darkness. The shipping containers, empty and abandoned, had been repurposed by a population that could not enjoy a daytime stroll topside. One sold secondhand books and leather jackets, another sold smutty magazines, and another an array of obsolete media that would have been otherwise forgotten. Mia’s favorite could be described only as a junk store. Half sold taxidermy antlers, faded wind-up toys, other people’s photographs; the other half was separated by a curtain beyond which the buzz of a tattoo gun could be heard near constantly.

A pawn shop with no name but a neon sign that read ‘kupujemo zlato’ offer her a place to get cash in exchange for Stoney’s diamond earring. She had checked her phone’s notifications a final time before negotiating a price. She had left the shop with a stack of bills that could buy Ela that dress and all twelve scents of the candles. 

Feeling flushed with cash Mia had allowed herself to look at the other jewelry that had found its way into the harshly lit display cases. She touched her septum, where a girl with an ice cube and a sewing needle had once given her a piercing in exchange for an undercut.

“Zdravo.” a voice said to her

“Hmm?” Mia blinked up and looked up from the case. A vampire, permanently looking a year away from growing the first greys in his shoulder length hair, lowered his sunglasses past his cheekbones to regard her.

“Zdravo.” he said again

“Oh, zdravo, hello.”

“Da li govoriš kao mrtvi?”

“No, sorry.” she said, understanding enough of the language he was speaking to tell him that she herself did not speak it. 

“Mali anđeo među grešnicima,” he said now, extending a hand towards Mia

“Um, no thank you?” she leaned away from the touch of his slender fingers “Rather not be touched by weird strangers in alleyways.”

“Kakvu svetlost tražite od onih koji to ne mogu podnijeti?”

“I’m uh….I’m looking for a septum ring? For my nose?" 

“Izgubljen si, mali anđeo, ovo nije mesto za tvoja blaga krila.”

“You don’t know anything I’m saying, do you?”

“Napusti ovo mjesto prije nego što te tama proguta cijeli.”

“None of this is processing? I could just- obtuse, rubber goose, green moose, guava juice, giant snake, birthday cake, large fries, chocolate shake?”

“Ili vas je mrak već dodirnuo?”

“Okay….” she nodded slowly “Alright.”

“Da, naravno, vidim crninu na vašim krilima, mali anđeo.”

“Stoney sent me a scrimmage invite on Rub Univerzuma and I’ve been at a battleground portal for days and he hasn’t even been online and I’d say I don’t know what that means, but I do know what it means. It means I’m an idealistic idiot that though I could just, I don’t know, be buds with the Brat Prince? We could just chill and play video games together like two normal people? Why did I even let myself think that’s something I get to have?”

“Brat Prince?” the vampire said with a heavy accent “Njegovo Kraljevsko Visočanstvo?”

“Yeah, that guy.” 

“Užasno dijete koje sramotno nosi svoje klansko ime.”      

“Oh, fuck off.” Mia rolled her eyes “Užasno dijete this, užasno dijete that. Doesn’t your kind ever get tired of pretending this kid is responsible for the downfall of your culture? Listen, I know I just talked shit about him but I’m feeling particularly emotionally jilted right now. You, on the other hand, might want to consider that maybe the reason most people think vampires are weird and not for them is because you’re out here doing weird shit like calling a woman you don’t know a lost little angel and trying to touch her fucking face. You know what, here’s something you will understand: jebi se, jedi govna, and puši kurac.” 


	15. Dr. Cole's Lesson

Dr. Cole had taught the children never to bend down to a dog’s level, to never stand at the rear of a horse, and to never be within lunging distance of a vampire unless you wear meaning to plunge a silver blade into their stagnant flesh. Miles Csonka had never heard such a lesson. He had grown up with vampires, as most everyone in Rockefeller did. The city had integrated decades before the Integration and ever crowded Metro car Miles had seen in his life had seen a mortal and undead pressed up against each other without a passing though as to what the other commuter was. 

He has told Mia this when they met on Tuesday, a compact voice recorder doing its job on the table between them and the necrologist scribbling notes in her moleskin about things that that could not be captured in audio. Most prominent of these was the crescent of dark scab blood on his jaw and cheek, now crisscrossed with stitches and discolored with healing. The resurrected body of Keysee Boskov-Rohl had gone for his neck, as newly turned were prone to do, but she had done so with the coordination of a body that had been lying on a dorm room floor for nineteen hours after her death. Her teeth, flat like a mortal’s as fangs took months to grow, had found the left side of his face instead and tore down to the bone.

 The wound would undoubtedly scar. There were creams and balms that could lessen the permanence of the damaged tissue but their active ingredients were derived from solarized Necro, and medical professionals were hesitant to use a blood-based treatment on someone who had only recently sustained a penetrative wound from a vampire’s bite. She had watched the young man look back at her, his eyes meeting hers but then flicking up to her brow bone. She sported a face scar of her own, a token of a childhood fall where she had split her eyebrow open on the edge of porch step. It too had healed without Necroblood, and when Miles Csonka had timidly asked about she had given him her typical answer about growing up beyond the city and under the care of people who preferred natural, plant based remedies. This had been enough of an explanation for him and he had picked back up recounting his memory of that weekend’s attack. One her way home Mia had wondered what she would have said if the young man had inquired further. It was one thing to right off Black Dirt as the lokalitet of woodsy yokels, and another entirely to tell someone the full truth. The people of Edelstadt and the other plateau communities believed that anything fluid from the body of the undead, even the vaccinations of the city, were sinful, and those who had been touched by it would have their souls excluded from the Great Salvation. If what Dr. Cole had taught the children was true, Keysee Boskov-Rohl had condemned not just her own soul but Miles Csonka’s too. 

Mia looked up from her phone screen as the Metro screeched to a stop. Outside the windows of the elevated train were a series of unremarkable and nondescript buildings that Mia knew as the ones that lined her platform. She stood, ducked around a man who had decided to hold on to the rails with both hands, and stepped off. Her phone had been in her hand since the Metro had come up from underground to cross over the concrete river, but only now did it presence make her heartbeat faster. 

Earlier that day, as she had been pulling the drawers from under her bed in an attempt to find both a decent interviewing outfit and not fall asleep standing up like the hours of the Boskov-Rohl case were making her want to, her phone had buzzed. She had flopped back onto her bed and turned over the small electronic to find a text message from the Brat Prince asking if he could call her later that evening. She had left him on read briefly as she considered the fact that he had followed up kissing her with three days of silence, but replied back when she realized she had neither the willpower nor particular desire to teach him any kind of lesson. They had decided she would tell him when she was off the train, because she had a few errands to run after interviewing the Csonka boy, but would be free to chat after that. 

She typed out a quick indication of this now, and headed down to street level. No sooner had she stepped off the last step then did her phone light up again with an incoming call.

“Hi.” she answered

“Hi.”

“Do you want to see what I see?”

“Mm, yeah.” he propped his phone up against something on a coffee table 

“Okay,”

Mia flipped her camera and the small electronic went black, give both only the audio; a train screeching away from a platform and far away sirens on her end and the sound of decades old grungy alternative rock playing from some sleek speaker in the luxurious space on his. After a moment the video reconnected and the rectangle in the corner of the screen now showed the not quite yet dusky street she was walking along. The rest of it was filled up with the image of Stoney, the Brat Prince lying on his side on a curved sofa in some spacious room. The backrest of his daybed was channel tufted, each rib of velvet upholstery lustering in the wash of lamp light. His head rested on his elbow and a cashmere throw was tossed over him, a busy jacquard fabric that was the color of port wine. His shoulders and chest were bare where the fabric did not cover. There was no reason for this to make her blush, scarcely a day went by without a man thinking a pair of bottoms was all he needed to cover his body as he strolled the corridors of Dwell™, but Mia had turned the camera around almost immediately so that Stoney did not see the color rise in her cheeks.

“How was your day?”

“Um, it was very much a day because my hours changed for this case I have to get up before noon now.”

“What case?” he asked, raising a crystal tumbler to his lips

“That Boskov-Rohl girl that resurrected in the Rockefeller University dorms over the weekend. I just got back from interviewing a collater- a guy who she bit in the cheek.”

“He good?”

“I mean a vampire did bite into his literal face, but she didn’t get an artery or an eyeball so he’ll be alright in the long term. I think he’s more shaken up than anything. People in this city can live everyday around vampires but they never see what it’s like when they first resurrect. They really think the undead do it behind closed doors with their clan because it’s some sacred ritual, not because the undead come back raving mad and half rotting and gaunt from the bane trying to cannibalism what’s left of their mortality.”

“Mm.” Stoney made a noncommittal sound and inspected the varnish on nails.

“Do you remember your resurrection?”

“Yeah. It sucked.”

“Sorry, I-” Mia winced “I’m not quite out of work mode yet, I guess. I usually don’t get back to Marina until well after dark.”

“This your neighborhood?” 

“Yeah,” she nodded and swept the camera around “Welcome to the beautiful Little Serbia, where Necro dealers are posted up on the corner across from Aioli Maja’s, the artisanal mayonnaise workshop and storefront.”

“Mayonnaise workshop sounds like when they put makeup on my skin so I look all bane-changed like a real royal and not like some dumb dead kid.”

“I like that you haven’t lost your pores yet.”

“That makes one of us.” he scrunched up his face and rubbed his nose “I never spent much time in Little Serbia, you like it there?”

“Yeah. The Dobrogost run a lot of social programs so it’s not like, Bad bad. There’s a few Metro lines around, the rent is reasonable, even the internet is pretty fast say if you want do stuff like, I don’t know, play Rub Univerzuma with someone after they sent you an invite and made it sound like they were into it and then haven’t been online in days.”

Stoney inhaled sharply, a mortal reflex that much like his pores, had not yet been erased by the strain of upir lyssavirus than had made a home in his very cells. Though he could not see Mia’s face, he had not needed it to discern her tone “I didn’t fuck up your game, did I?”

“No. I play a Scout so I can be away from my team for awhile, I just….you know….felt a little foolish running circles around a portal waiting for you.”

“I was getting ready to get my ass kicked.” he joked, “Hadda hype myself up.”

“Alright.”

“I didn’t mean to….not think about your feelings and stuff,” he said, mumbling into the arm his cheek was rested against “I fucking….I should’ve been- whatever….you get it. Tell me more about where you live. What’s your favorite place?”

“Ljiljana’s.” she answered quickly “Without a doubt.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a bar a few blocks down from my place. It’s a tiny little thing, and it’s down a few steps on the lower level so you could walk right past it if you didn’t know it was there. That’s what I like about it though, it’s like, the people that go to Ljiljana’s are the people that always go there. You know what I mean? But also if it’s your first time there and it’s one of the more, uh, raucous nights, you get pulled right in like it’s been your home for twenty years.”

“You should take me there some night.” he said with a smirk

“Mm, one of the other nice things about Ljiljana’s is strangers don’t photograph you from across the street when you’re trying to have a drunk makeout session.”

Again, through the pixels of the small screen Stoney looked concerned. He had a brow that seemed shaped to carry stress in it, and now that he was sober she could see an unnamable anxiety knotted across it. “I didn’t know they was gonna take a picture of you.”

“It’s fine.”

“It ain’t. You know it ain’t. Every fucking thing I do they gotta pick at it.”

“Hey, I’m part of that ‘they’, gawking at the bars of the Brat Prince’s zoo exhibit is how I afford this phone you’re calling me on right now.”

“Yeah but you never got the memo about being a dick to me.”

“Oh, no, I got the memo. It said ‘the new prince is this big goofy dude that’s as gauche as he is gaudy and we can all pretend we’re punching up because he’s very rich, when we probably should not be making fun of a twenty one year old kid for publically living out his awkward stage’. I just never listen to memos.”

“Hvala te.” 

“You’re welcome.”

Stoney watched her walk for a moment and took a few sips of dark liquid from his glass before asking “What’s gauche mean?”

“It means Queen Ivana didn’t teach you how to be a proper, traditional vampire before she turned you, or if she did you didn’t absorb any of it.”

“Yeah, nobody ever accused me of being a quick learner.”

Mia rounded the corner to her block now, passing the small store she sometimes stopped in between the Metro and her place. It was too early for vampires to be leaned against the supports of the scaffolding that surrounded it but she wondered what they would have thought if they had seen their Prince on her screen. There would be less of them out tonight anyway, as the royal Veceslav-Bozhena clan and several others of influence in Angulem would be holding their Midnight Meetings when the sun went down. Members of smaller clans like the Dobrogost of Little Serbia, the Drazhan of Vilkograd, and the Ntombi of Trokut would make their way over to the main island to attend these meetings or at the very least be seen in the proximity of them.

“Are you in Dva Mosta tonight?” she asked him

“Mhm, yeah.” he nodded, setting his drink forward on the table “We got the penthouse at the Classic, it’s uh, by the water. Front St and Klizač, I want to say?”

“Yeah that’s….a fancy place.”

“Well I’m a fancy boy.”

“I can see that.” she said “Oscar Wilde is quaking in his grave right now.”

“If he got a grave.”

“Light Above. You’re not one of those are you?”

Stoney smiled at the way she rolled her eyes “One of what?”

“They buried him in a grave.”

“Rude ass thing to do to a vampire.”

“Oscar Wilde isn’t a vampire!”

“If he ain’t then why did Carol Yilmaz of Seneca Township, Eastwoods see him in the dairy aisle of her local Shopper’s Way?” he said with a sort of unflappable self-assurance that Mia could not help but find frustratingly charming “The truth is out there, Lady.”

“Mm, I’m going to bet not that truth.”

Stoney shrugged “He gonna be quaking either way cause they finishing up the stitching on my odijelo now. Lux said it’s very funky, exceedingly fresh, and tubular in ways you can’t even imagine.”

“Well, I look forward to rushing to get some actual journalism about tonight’s outfits out before the Order swamps the Feed with all their fucking listicles and ‘fab or dab’ polls.”

“What are you doing tonight?”

“I don’t know. I might do Drop™ but I don’t know what requests are going to be like tonight with all the Meetings. It’s becoming easier to get more red stuff midway through the night now that more pickup points are opening but still, underbuying hurts my rating, overbuying hurts my wallet.”

The Prince looked thoughtful for a moment “I could do something about that.”

“Yeah?” she said, knowing the closeness with which Drop™ and the clan which had funded their starting up were tied “The Veceslav-Bozhena has that kind of influence?”

“I have that kind of influence.” he corrected “I’ll tell the engineers to make one of those algorithm things for you.”

“Hvala,” she said softly and covered her mouth when she smiled. A man could buy her bouquets of flowers and countless gifts and she would hollowly thank him out of some social obligation, but nothing charmed her like one with the power to make her job more efficient. He had power in regards to her other job too. Even as the St. Malo’s fire became older and older news, Mads had not budged on her decision that Mia would be interviewing the Brat Prince. The pictures PopPress had only cemented her opinion that DANA was in possession the necrologist  skilled enough to break his silence.

It was not skill, though. Whatever data Mads had looked at before assigning Mia the monumental task had been little more than statistics and analytics. No chart of article traffic over time could capture the look in Stoney’s eyes though the only thing to focus on was the trash stained sidewalk and undermaintained buildings of a neighborhood that had been up-and-coming for nearly a decade now. He was taken with her in the way young men sometimes were. As they had sat together in Eastside she had felt his hand nearly shaking in the moments before he slipped it into hers to lace their finger together. 

“Why you quiet?” he asked

“Hmm? Nothing, I was just thinking about something.”

“Turn the camera back around.” he said, giving this direction with such an offhanded confidence that Mia did it immediately and without question, “I like this view better.”

“Yeah, I figured.”

He smiled “Oh, you figured?”

“Yeah. At least one of us has some subtly about…” she motioned between them “This.”

“I read your articles. You ain’t got an ounce of it.”

“Oh, you should see the versions Sloane hasn’t c-”

She stopped when Stoney sat up. The sound of a fist against a solid door could be heard through her headphones and more clearly where he was. When the Brat Prince had sat up the blanket had slipped down to gather around his waist, the fabric just grazing his navel. 

Someone said something through the door and Stoney’s shoulders moved with a sigh. A door Mia couldn’t see opened and the young woman who had celebrated her birthday at the club walked into the room. She had traded her shimmering dress and hair extensions for a pink velour tracksuit and chin length hair that was half up a scrunchie secured bun. 

“Willow left some of her shit in here.” Sapphire said, walking past the frame

“Why is Willow leaving her shit in the room where I’m sleeping?”

“I don’t know, why are you sleeping in the room where Willow left her shit?”

Stoney made a face at her and then laid back down across the sofa. He extended a hand towards the table and then looked unhappy.

“Hey, hey Saph, c’mere.” he tilted his head back as he called her over and a moment later the back of one of her legs could be seen on Mia’s screen.

“What?”

“Can’t reach my drink.” he said, “Can you get it for me?”

“Jedi govna.” Sapphire scoffed and then picked up the crystal tumbler that had been just out of Stoney’s arm’s reach. He thanked her, to which she scoffed again and then bent down to look at his phone screen “Is this the necrologist?”

“None of your beeswax, kid.”

“So that’s a yes?” she said, and then to Mia “Did you see what he just did?”

“Called you over just so he didn’t have to reach for his glass? Yeah.” 

“He is. So Annoying. Literally the most annoying boy in the world.” Sapphire said, now going as if she was going to sit on the couch but planting herself on Stoney’s ribs instead.

“You’re crushing meeeee!” he whined, feigning that he could not breathe even though a vampire had no necessity to pull air into their lungs

“Šuti.” she clapped her hand over his mouth but shrieked and pulled it away a second later “Ew! Cae! You’re so gross! He fucking licked my hand!”

“Hey.” he said, pointing to the screen

“Uh, fine. Prince Macaroni Pony Pepperoni.” she rolled her eyes “So what are you two talking about?”

“Um, just like, my neighborhood.” Mia said “I live in Marina, do you, um, are you-”

“I wish I lived there. I live in Black Dirt with this turd.” she said, and then directly to him asked “Why aren’t you downstairs with everyone else? You have to leave at sundown.”

“I’m waiting for Lux to bring me something to wear tonight. She said five minutes.”

“Well it’s been way more that five since she le-” she stopped as a realization spread across her face “Are you fucking naked under there?”

“Emotionally or physically?” he asked “Because really, can any of us ever be emotionally naked? Or is we just-”

“I mean physically!”

“Oh yeah, my whole ass out.” 

“Ew.” she said “I’m leaving.”

“Good. Bye. Get out my room, booger face.” he said and pushed her off of him. A moment later a heavy door closed and Stoney turned his attention back to Mia. “Was we still talking about your neighborhood?”

“No, we were talking about how Sloane has to copyedit my transparently horny articles. I know people with her abilities are supposed to pay some kind of debt for being able to commune directly with the Goddesses but man, didn’t think it would be having to read my thirsty drafts about my fucking, celebrity crush.”

“You got a crush on me?” he grinned

“I guess tall, gauche, white dudes with squinty smiles are my weakness.”

“Don’t forget my beautiful blue eyes,” he took a sip from his glass “Short haired girls who write good and can fuck someone up with a knife are my weakness.”

“Oh, well I’ve got some good news for you.” she laughed “I’m also very pretty.”

“Light Above,” he threw his head back “You’re so fucking pretty, it’s not fair.”

“More! More!” Mia laughed, moving her hands as if fanning his compliments towards her “I crave validation.”

Stoney smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling as he ran a hand through his hair. He watched as Mia glanced away to unlock the front door to Dwell™ and shake the urban filth off her boots with the shoe cleaner in the lobby. When she looked up he had brought his phone closer to him and spoke more softly "Come here."

“What? To Dva Mosta?”

“Yeah. I want to see you.”

“I just got home.”

He shrugged “So?”

“So, I want to take my makeup off and lie down.”

“Take your makeup off and lie down here.”

“With you?”

“Mhm.”

“You’re not wearing any clothes.”

“That a problem?”

Mia put a hand to her face as if it could hid the flush of her cheeks “You have a Midnight Meeting to go to,  Vaša Milost.”

“I’ll skip. Come here.”

“Stoney! I can’t!”

“Why not?”

“Because, as much as I-” she glanced around the empty lobby of her building and lowered her voice anyway “As much as I would like to be on that sofa with you right now, I’m not traveling forty five minutes and taking two trains to fuck a guy I’ve hung out with once.” 

“Mia. Get your ass here right now!” he said, laughing as he tried to sound assertive “I’m skipping the meeting, don’t make me spend the night alone.”

“You’re not skipping! You’re the Prince and Nasljednik, and I have spent too much time keeping your name clean in the tomes to let you skip a Midnight Meeting to fuck some pretty little thing that you don’t know the first thing about.”

“I know you want to come over.”

“I can’t. I swear to the Light, Stoney, it’s….it’s against my mortals as a necrologist. Go to the Meeting, fuck one of those wannabe devotees if you’re that desperate to get your nut off. I’m going to heat up some quinoa and catch up on a fic I’m reading.”

The Brat Prince looked down and away, not meeting her gaze through the screen when he spoke next “If you wasn’t doing that, and I didn’t have my shit to do, would you come over?”

“I have an open case on you.” she said, now leaning against the wall opposite the elevator bay “I couldn’t…. it would compromise my journalistic integrity to sleep with you.”

“I never said nothing about sex.” he mumbled “Not unless you wanted to.”

Mia watched the numbers across from her lower until the care came to her level, the doors sliding open and beckoning her inside the LED lined box. “The call is going to drop as soon as I get in the elevator.”

“Oh.”

“I might get online instead of read.”

“On the Rub Univerzuma server?”

“Yeah.”

“I got, uh-” he twisted over and picked up a gold watch from the table “I got time.”

“Okay. Give me a minute to make my dinner and uh, I’ll see you in whatever randomly generated training ground I’m going to kick your fucking ass in.”

Stoney smiled into his knuckles “Okay, see you in a bit.”

“Bye,” she waved to the screen as the stepped into the elevator

“Doviđenja.” he said, taking another drink from his crystal glass. The image froze on this screen as it dropped, and Mia knew it was blood in his tumbler, and when he drew it away from his mouth there was the slight stain of red on his lips. She felt suddenly jealous of the glass’s contents for being able to fill his mouth. Dr. Cole had taught the children never be within lunging distance of a vampire unless you wear meaning to plunge a silver blade into their stagnant flesh. Mia had learned his lesson, but she had no interest in practicing it.


	16. Watching Movies

Mia had fallen asleep with her underwear still pushed down around her thighs, a practical rearranging of her clothing so the waistband did not press against her wrist as she masturbated.

She had eaten her quinoa and played Rub Univerzuma for about an hour before Stoney’s royal duties called. Assistants had dressed him in something other than a blanket and he had managed to get a cigarette in between dressing and being herded into a car to drive he and his small posse to a building barely half a mile away. He had prepared for the meeting somewhat begrudgingly, as if he thought the longer he stayed online or on a call with Mia the more likely it was that she would for some reason grant him permission to shirk his obligation, though he had not asked her to come over again. When he had absolutely need to go it was reluctantly; one of the livestreaming drones had found him as he stepped out of the car and would surely not leave him alone until after the monthly ceremony had concluded. Stoney held the phone close to his velvet and floral embroidery clad chest but it was near impossible to keep the necrologist’s privacy when an airborne camera a few feet above his head had a zoom lens. It had taken Mia hanging up to avoid Stoney’s idea of throwing a heavy ruby studded cufflink at the voyeuristic camera. This was the most convenient option for Mia, as she did not want to write a Feed-featured piece about Stoney throwing a piece of jewelry that cost approximately the same as most people’s rent like it was a weighty pebble he had found on the ground, and because she had a particular vested interest in the livestream that followed the Brat Prince after he had slipped his phone into his jacket pocket.

Each Cube by Dwell™ came with a not insignificant sized screen that when turned on would default to a four by four grid of video feeds; four for ‘discover’, eight for ‘explore’ and four for the actually channel you wanted to watch. When a specific box was selected it would grow three times its size, leaving a border of muted advertisements around the edges to make sure a resident was still being marketed too at all times. There was no way to search a specific channel, but no sooner had she gotten off the phone with Stoney than she set her monitor to provide her with the most popular livestream tagged with his name. She had need to type it twice, forgetting to put the ‘Prince’ at the beginning of his name. It the alley where she had held one of his cigarettes on her lips he had asked her to call him Stoney, having her say it twice and neither with the prefix of his royal title; she had not given any thought to the informality of this until he had called her with his shoulders and chest bare lying sideways on a sofa.

 The video stream stayed steady, the airborne camera stabilized despite having to dip and dodge around the other drones that were more interested in capturing how fine fabrics draped over the unnaturally shapely bodies of the undead than following one in particular. Vampires dressed in red and gold milled around the narthex of the Royal Keep, posing on the porches or on the steps for photographs. Stoney stepped up to take his among them, dressed in a tailored suit that brought out the broadness of his shoulders and the length of his legs. It was a fine black fabric, detailed with gold thread that made up the dense pattern of slender stalked flowers with dropping bells of petals. The red of his clan’s crest was reflected on the soles of his boots and in the dark shimmery polish on his nails, and when his lips curled into his signature sneer for the camera they revealed a single ruby gemstone imbedded in the gold that covered his teeth.

Mia picked up her phone and typed out a simple ‘can’t believe you were going to hid that very funky and exceedingly fresh fit from the adoring public’.

A moment later the glass over his watch’s face turned opaque, and with a small tap it displayed her message to him, his eyes finding the lens of the camera when they looked up from the watch. He smirked back at her. 

It was, admittedly, not the first time she had masturbated to the idea of the Brat Prince. The dedicated motion of her hand between her legs had been her first orders of business after his Ordainment. She had not gone home to where she had been living in Vilkograd but instead to Ljiljana’s where she had helped tidy up the barroom enough to be given a room upstairs for the night. After six months of living with her then-boyfriend she had figured out that their studio apartment arrangement did not work out well when Torin was stressed from studying; if she was not doing something to set him off then she was making a dedicated effort not to, which itself could be enough of an annoyance to make the normally composed young man erupt. It was easier to spend nights at the bar, even if she was not legally old enough to drink there. Ljiljana’s was the kind of place that pulled you right in like it had been your home for twenty years.

Much as she had in the rented bed above the barroom, Mia now in her own box of a bedroom and with a livestream of the Brat Prince taking his seat to the right of the Queen in the chancel of St. Malo’s, thought about him. She thought about if she had said yes and met him at the Classic Hotel across the river. His red nailed, tattoos hands would be on her instead of resting on the arms of carved highbacked seat, his mouth would not be tightlipped and bored but open and soft against her skin, he would not be wearing his embroidered suit at all when she felt the weight of his hips against hers.

She woke up with a start from the deep sleep of having drifted off feeling like her muscles were relaxed and heavy. The video of the Midnight Meeting had ended when Stoney left the ornate chair by Queen Ivana’s side. He had ducked into the back so that the cameras could not follow him and the channel had gone staticky as it scanned for any other captures of his image. As Mia had slept it had found one in the sea of livestreams, snapping over to the young woman's recording with such abruptness that it had startled the necrologist awake.

The cell phone camera caught the Prince in profile, his eyes fixed forward on the road as he drove with one hand on the wheel of a car nicer than anything Mia had ever been in. Colored lights of the city’s neon passes quickly over his face as he cruised along the late night streets. A cigarette hung from his lips, bobbing as he rattled off lyrics to the song playing.

“-class getting led by students, smoke some weed, get head while I do it, started out under the ground, they didn’t fuck with me, now they all coming around, money I'm- Hey! Are you recording me?” Stoney had swept his eyes across an intersection, catching sight of the phone as he did so and not liking it at all “Knock that off.”

“It’s a livestream.” the voice behind the camera said

“I don’t give a fuck. I said knock that shit off.”

The camera turned, a face filter appearing over it’s new subject before there was even a chance to consider that the young woman had anything but perfectly dewy skin. Mia had told Stoney to take his pick of the living Rockefellians that held the undead in such high regard they practically groveled at the step of their temples and cathedrals. He had apparently done just this. The mortal was model-pretty as she posed, angling her face and pouting her lips with the assistance of an app that always gave her cheekbones the right highlight even in the dark car. A faux-leather choker was around her neck, and shiny letter along it spelled out ‘baby bunny’. Mia did not need to hear her to know that the young woman would not be addressing the Prince as  Vaša Milost.

“Where are we going, daddy?” she made eyes at the camera instead of Stoney

“I’m getting chicken tenders, I don’t know where the fuck you’re going.” he said in an even-voiced attempt to ignore the fact that he had just been called ‘daddy’. The camera turned to him again and he gave a scowling glance at the screen “Bout to be on the side of the road if you don’t turn that thing off.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“You don’t fucking know me.” he said

The young woman giggled “Don’t I?”

Stoney’s sideways glance turned into a full turn of his head, brows furrowing in though as he tried to place her face and keep an eye on the road too. To the livestream viewer, the filter had smoothed her in such a way that it was impossible to tell if her skin belonged to someone who was thirteen or thirty, but if Mia had to guess she would have placed the woman in her mid-twenties. Her voice, like the rest of her, was an affectation; such an exact facsimile of a Soldorado celebrity that it was clearly hiding some less desirable accent. 

“What?” his eyebrows raised with a realization 

“You thought I’m the kind of girl that gets into cars with strangers?” she laughed again, the camera focuses on Stoney as his eyes darted between her and the road. The cigarette in his mouth had developed a short pillar of ash as he forgot about the comforting vice. “Our class is having our ten year reunion next year, maybe you can come d-”

“Turn that off right now.” he said, a sudden seriousness coming over his voice. It did not deepen with assertiveness, nor was there any threatening timbre. Instead it rose from his usual mutter, scrapping up against the rasp of his tone in what seemed unsettlingly similar to a voice full of fear. “Don’t say another fucking thing. Go home, pack your shit, get out of the city.”

“You’re so dramatic,” she continued to laugh “I know you didn’t gr-”

The sound and image cut out suddenly, the camera recording only the Prince’s palm over the lense before he seemly crumpled the electronic in his hand. Mia’s screen stayed black for several seconds until the box that had been showing her the stream sank back into the four by four grid of feeds catered to her interests. She looked at them without really seeing anything, instead feeling an emotion that was both fierce and unnamable as it floated just below the surface of her psyche. She wanted to fight, thought she could not place who it was in particular that she wanted to land punches on. It was not the women in the video, as there would be no utility in causing her pain. Stoney had been the only other subject of what she had watched, and though she felt a surge in the fierceness of her aggression when she thought of this, it seemed to radiate out from him instead of focusing on him. It was perhaps not even a fight she wanted. Mia did not want to momentarily harm anyone as much as she felt a sudden need to permanently incapacitate anyone with the power to bring harm to Stoney.

Her phone buzzed. A second later it buzzed again and then twice more. Notifications began to pop up in the top corner of her screen as a group chat of necrologists began to speculate where it was that the Brat Prince was headed. Mia, along with every other necrologist who had put their year in as an underpaid intern at the Order, remember one of nonsense listicles she had been made to write. The Brat Prince had never publicly endorsed any fast food chain like the other post-Integration vampires on the list, but he had been seen on several occasions in the Buttermilk Chick’s nearest to St. Malo’s, where he would order a five piece basket of their double fried tenders tossed in buffalo sauce with onion rings and a side of sour cream.

‘you going to buttermilk chick’s on 8th?’ she typed out

‘yea’ he texted back ‘meet me?’

‘i think you’ve been seen with enough women tonight’ she replied, and then thinking that it may have sound petty added ‘go uptown, 33rd or 43rd. cameras are trying to catch you on 8th.’

‘hvala’

‘no problem’

‘maybe necrologists aint all bad ;)’


	17. Danse Macabre

The news cycle had moved on from Keysee Boskov-Rohl’s death by the time of Colt Draper's preliminary hearing, so that when the judge determined the evidence would not support a charge of, and trial for, murder, the public outrage was not so outrageous. Mia’s walk between the Metro station and WorkSpace™ was dotted with only a handful of activists and demonstrators around Zimmerman Square Park. Their numbers swelled the weekend after the decision, and then dwindled down as other obligations or simple defeat took precedence. Colt Draper had appeared on Reardon Breit’s show wearing his best dress shirt and the shit eating grin of a murderer who had slipped the proverbial noose.

As Mia’s commute returned to normal so did her schedule, the waning of interest in the Boskov-Rohl case meaning her shift could returned to her usual three to eleven and the artificial voice of her Cube could stop scolding her for sleeping strange hours. Summer pressed onwards in a way that at first glances felt indistinguishable from every other summer since working full time, but upon further inspection was markedly that of her twenty sixth year. She had reduced her student loans and increased the softness around her formerly small waist,  she had pushed a piece of metal through the septum piercing she had let close since an old boyfriend had told her it made her look like a bull, and she had forgot why she even liked that guy in the first place now that she found herself taking to the Brat Prince nearly everyday.

Mia and Stoney would leave their headsets on after a game, idling on screens that they would have normally clicked out of right away. They talked through the rectangular screen of a video chat as Mia folded her laundry or as Stoney strode around his house looking for favorite shirt because not doing his own laundry meant he sometimes lost articles of clothing in his sprawling Black Dirt estate. He had called her as he sat on the floor of his kitchen pantry because he had grown tired of his own party and this was a place no one wandered, and he had called her as she ran her weekend errands where she stocked up on the cardamom-vanilla flavor of some almond based vegan protein drink called Mjlk+ that she said the office biohackers had turned her on to. When Mia had told Stoney that she tended not to eat dairy he had needed to put his phone down so he could press his palms to his temples and imagine a life without cheese. 

It was with some relief that he found her picking at takeout ćevapi and salad when she called him back on a dinner break from work. She propped her phone up against a biodegradable cup and sat at the long counter of cast concrete where she normally ate on break.

“Origins was the worst installment and you can’t change my mind.” she was saying between bites of the grilled mincemeat kabob “The first screen of the first game says there is an unstoppable, unflinching, and unyielding horror that consumes everything its path by erasing it from the collective conscious of all beings, and for that reason life is fleeing outward into the cosmos, to the edge of the universe, to Rub Univerzuma.”

“Yeah, I know, I played it. Is this what mansplaining is? Cause I don’t like it.” he laughed

“No, it’s just the way I am. Welcome to being friends with me. I’m insufferable.”

“Mm, friends? Is that what we is?”

“Šuti.” she rolled her eyes at the look he was giving her, it was one that had become increasingly familiar in the past few weeks “Anyway, what I was saying is that I don’t think we needed an entire installment that gives us an origin story for the Creeping Horror. Fox Jugovac makes excellent games but I don’t need to play through a metaphor for his paternal abandonment complex. The whole idea that thing that’s killing the universe stems from the torment of an unloved child is like, weirdly insulting to kids that don’t have parents?”

“Yeah. That is kind of fucked, ain’t it.” Stoney said, his brow creasing slightly with thought. He looked into the middle distance for a moment and then caught sight of something off screen that was rapidly approaching the upholstered chair he had draped himself across. 

A moment later both Prince and furniture were nearly knocked over by a massive, black furred creature that was approximately the size of a small horse. A thick tail thumped against the door frame he had rushed through and Stoney steadied himself as he got the armchair back on all four legs. The enormous pet bent his knees and settled on the floor, still large enough to rest his head in Stoney’s lap even when he was lying down. 

Mia had grown up hearing about hellhounds, how they would roam in packs and rip grown men limb from limb before eating them bones and all and then drag their souls to the pits of hell to please their infernal master. Even after she had moved to Rockefeller and learned that most of her childhood lessons were tall tales spun by the bias of the adults around her, she had still been told that feral hellhounds were not a creature that would reciprocate your kindness. She had felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up the first time she had seen Clegane, but knew now that Stoney’s pet more oversized lap dog than frightful beast. The Brat Prince made a kissing sound and the hellhound dragged it’s rough tongue along the side of his face.

“Gross.” Mia laughed

“Yeah, I think he been after the geese again.” he took Clegane by the bottom jaw and examined his mouth “You been eating those mean old birdies, Baby-boop?” 

Clegane blinked his firey eyes and tilted his head down in a dog’s version of an apology for strewing the grounds of the estate with goose blood and stray feathers.

“They probably deserved it.” Mia said “People talk about upir lyssavirus being an invasive species like they’ve never seen a suburb in Giry. Any open grass and it’s fucking swarmed by geese.”

“What kind of people you talking to that say the bane an invasive species?”

“No one, just, you know, I’ve heard a lot of opinions.”

“Mm.” he nodded “You gonna be online tonight?”

“No. I’m out at eleven and then I have to pick up a couple pints of the red stuff and make enough money that I can go shopping because I think some of the vampires that I keep interviewing about this whole Pridvor/Dalibor dispute are starting to suspect that I’m mixing and matching the same like, five items of business casual clothing I own.”

“But I wanna play video games with you.” he whined

“And I want a one bedroom apartment with room to have friend spend the night and laundry in unit and an island I can put stools at and enough room that the side of my bed isn’t against the wall and also a desk in front of a window that overlooks greenspace and a shower that’s part of a tub and not just a stall, but I can’t afford that and I can’t afford clothes for my first job if I don’t work my second job.”

“You doing Drop™, yeah?”

“Mhm. I deleted BLDR and Vital®️ off my phone because it felt weird to have them when you kind of invented Drop™.”

“Farrah and Jeong-Suk invented Drop™, all I did was vibe with them and have a lot of money.” he said and smiled “Now we all got a lot more.”

“Mhm, so I’ve heard.”

“What’s your account? You registered as Mia or Esinamia?”

“Why?”

“Just tell me your username.”

“It’s e.v.whitt, but I’m pretty sure you’re outside of my delivery radius.”

“What’s the v for?” he said as the screen went blurry and white text told her his video stream was paused “You got a middle name or something?”

“Yeah. Esinamia Virtue Whitt. If you couldn’t tell I was born in Black Dirt and raised under the Big God my full name will let you-” she stopped in the middle of her sentence as a notification dropped down at the top of her screen “Light Above, how are you requesting me right now? You’re like a hundred miles away and my app isn’t even on.”

“One hundred and twenty three.” he said, canceling the unfulfillable request seconds after he had sent it “I can do whatever I want on Drop™, ‘cept tip you more than two digits.”

“Fuck, Stoney,” she exhaled, her account balance suddenly jumping 99.99 as he tipped her and requested again 

“Hmm?”

“That’s- you can’t-”

“Can’t what?” he said with a grin in his voice as another tip went into her account “If you don’t want it tell me to stop.”

“Uuugh.” she groaned and watched her balance jump a third time “Okay, that’s enough.”

“Nah, it ain’t.” he laughed “Welcome to being friends with me. I’m insufferable.”

“You’re trying to buy my attention is what you’re doing.” she said as Stoney fell into a rhythm of requesting, canceling, and tipping.

“What about it? Can’t I- ah jebote. Can I only do this ten times? Fuck.”

“Stoney,” she ran both hand back across her short hair and exhaled “This is like, almost as much as my rent costs.”

“You want me to pay that too?”

“No! Stop it.”

“What’s your landlord’s name, I’ll cut her a check.”

“Stoney!”

The video turned back on and he lifted his hands in defense “Fine! I’m done! You ain’t mad at me, are you?”

“No. I’m just….I’m subscribing to the notion that it’s unchill to try to buy someone’s attention when they tell you they can’t play video games all the time.”

“You subscribing to what?”

“I’m not playing Rub Univerzuma with you tonight.” she said “I’m not doing deliveries either but I’m not going to accept you invite to a game if you try.”

“Are you trying to teaching me a lesson?”

“Yeah. I’m not going to be your kept women.”

His brow creased again and he frowned “You don’t gotta be anything you don’t wanna. You ain’t kept or nothing.”

“It sort of looks like that when you just gave me more money in a couple minutes than I get in a single biweekly paycheck from DANA.”

“Maybe you just my woman.” he said, his face made up of digital pixels but still looking straight into Mia. She felt her heartbeat jump and could have sworn that he somehow felt her quickened pulse as well.

"Um, well, 'woman' is not my favorite phrasing of the concept."

"Oh, would you rather," he put his hand up to pantomime tipping the brim of a fedora and could not help himself from laughing before he had even made the joke "M'lady." 

"Gross." she rolled her eyes, thankful that the moment had fell quickly into their usual banter. She looked down at her half finished ćevapi, the grilled meat having gone tepid as they talked, and thought about how it would have sounded if he had not been joking. Royals of the Veceslav-Bozhena clan that could not sport titles like Prince and Princess were called Lord and Lady by royal tradition. Her next words where spoken in a quiet tone of someone forgetting they were being listened to "Maîtresse-en-titre."

"Hmm?"

“Nothing, I'm uh, I’m probably taking too long of a break, I should get back to work.”

“Right, yeah, of course.”

“Yeah, it’s just, you know, working and….work.”

“Mhm,” he nodded “That’s how it go.”

“Alright. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

“Yeah, yeah. Laku noć.”

“Laku noć.” she said back “Bye.”

“Bye.”

Mia hung up, her phone returning to the background of her home screen. She stared blankly at the image, some glitch art edited renaissance painting of a naked woman being embraced by a winged skeleton that she had found online with no credit to the artist, and then shook her head. She would get back to work in a minute, but for now there were ćevapi to tip into the compost shoot and an urgent need to start a group call with Sloane, Jasna, and Ela.


	18. The Šumarak

With her night freed up by somewhat dubious circumstances, Mia rode home considering what she might do for the next four or five hours until she was tired enough to lie down. The Metro train pulled into her stop and she watched the door between the car and platform open, her hand not unwrapping itself from the pole she was holding on to. The next stop was walkable, some twenty minutes from her place at a comfortable stroll but quicker if her pace increased. She let this platform pass her by too. The next stop was on the border of Little Serbia and Trokut, far enough south that if she walked it that would its own activity for the evening. Two more stops took her to a junction where various lines intersected and the local service switched to express for those who live far out in Marina. 

She stepped off the train as the announcement overhead reminded them that this was the last local stop. The junction was a strangely laid out maze of lines coming together without a public works project to streamline them, and twenty four hour stores that opened in little hollows left by quick construction and traces of vampires that, unlike the Brat Prince, did not live in lavish estates but rode the subterranean Metro lines from end to end during the daylight hours, waiting for sundown to emerge topside. 

Her eyes stayed down as she navigated this network, knowing where she was going and having no reason to look up at the other Rockefellians went where they were going. If she had wanted to interact with someone she would have to take her headphones off, and this was not something she was interested in doing while out in public. When her boots feel on sidewalk she looked up. The city did not tower here, far our in Trokut where it was all ends of the line and elevated highways that passed overhead without exits. The low demand for housing meant the buildings were low; if it was not the rumble of urban infrastructure that kept renters away from southeastern Trokut it was the quietness. Mia had not even needed to lower her headphones to hear the pressing silence of the Šumarak. 

Tractor trailers and heavy construction vehicles past on the right side of her as she walked the narrow path that the concrete barricades that jutted out into the road made. Normally the sound would reflect, bouncing off the building to her left, or possibly being absorbed it it had been some kind of park or tree lined plaza. The Šumarak was neither. The sound hit it, a rattle of steel beams on the back of a flatbed as it cruised over a pothole, and then ceased to exist. It was not reflected and not absorbed, but overwhelmed by the silence of the dark grove. 

Mia walked between the barricade and the fence that was meant to keep people out of the wooded place when light and sound would not travel far without being snuffed out. She found the gap where the chainlink could be pushed up and did just that to sneak into the Šumarak. The silence as even louder inside the grove, it pressed against her ears as if she was underwater.

People said there were ghosts in the Šumarak, and they were right. One could sense it from almost half a mile away, but even if one was drawn to the strange land it was likely it would remain little more than a feeling. Death was shy, and hid from the mortals that did not know Him well. He showed himself first in a woman that moved as if she was rushing through a grocery store, rounding an aisle only she could see with such urgency that she would have rushed through Mia too if the necrologist had not preemptively side stepped.

“Oh!” the woman exclaimed “Oprosti! I didn’t see you there!”

“Don’t worry about it.”

The woman fixed the patterned scarf around her neck and then looked more decidedly at Mia “Have you seen something called….cauliflower crust pizza?”

“Gluten free?”

“Yes! Exactly!”

“It might be in the frozen section. I’ve seen gluten free bread in freezers before.”

“Oh interesting. My son, he’s on one of those paleo-keto-potato diets, I can barely keep up with these things nowadays. We’re having a birthday dinner for his father, it’s a surprise, ah! I have so much to do!”

“Well, don’t let me keep you then.” she smiled and motioned the woman to some unseen aisle. She thanked her for her help and then faded into darkness as she hurried away.

For a minute Mia stood there, thinking about the woman and the grocery store she could not see. She wondered if the woman had found the specialty crust or if she had needed to go to another store to find it. 

“Oh! Oprosti! I didn’t see you there!”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Her pattern scarf was askew once more and she corrected it “Have you seen something called….cauliflower crust pizza?”

“Yeah, um,”

“Gluten free, too. My son is on one of those paleo-keto-potato diets.”

“Hard to keep up with them nowadays, isn’t it.”

“Ah! My thoughts exactly! First it’s carbs and then it’s cooked food and then it’s gluten.”

“Tell me about it. You know, I’ve seen gluten free bread in freezers before. It might be in the frozen section.”

“Oh interesting. We’re having a birthday dinner for my husband, it’s a surprise, ah! I have so much to do!”

“Well, don’t let me keep you then.” 

Mia waved her off again and then stepped back. She had figured out the distance was about eight feet or so, and if you were further from the projection that this they could not see you, and you could not quite focus fully on them. The woman repeated her loop again, though this time there was no shaved head necrologist to recommend her towards the freezer aisle. Mia’s business was not with the shopper, nor was it with the sobbing young man who came into view as she passed but was never coherent enough to speak.

She walked further until she saw a man of about forty. He had seemed old once, with his lined brow and dark hair flecked with grey, but lately Mia had become aware of the fact that she would be older than that herself one day. For a moment she hesitated, knowing his loop was long and that she could enter at her leisure. They said that if one merely thought of the Šumarak with too much dedication that the grove would possess them; this was categorically untrue but Mia could not help but consider the fact that she had not consciously thought about what she was doing there until moments before she did it. She stepped forward and began to amble parallel to a ghostly projection of a man who had stepped off the mortal coil a decade and a half prior.

“Hello.” he nodded politely as their paths merged

“Hi.” Mia returned the nod. In her head she counted each footfall as a beat. On the sixth one he cleared his throat in the silence of the woods.

“I can’t help but notice,” Dr. Cole said in the same tone he always started their conversation in “You look….extraordinarily like a woman I know, you could be sisters.”

“Could we?”

“Yes, um, Thomasina’s her name. Thomasina Whitt. Do you know her?”

Mia shook her head. She did not know her mother. “I don’t, I’m sorry.”

“No, not many people do.” he shook off the thought “She’s a very private woman, rarely comes into town nowadays.”

“What is she like?”

Dr. Cole pursed his lips. He had answered Mia more times than she could count, but to this projection of him it was the first time he had been asked. “Devout. We like to think of ourselves as the righteous folk here on the plateau, but I’m afraid the younger generation may be faltering in their commitment. No offense to you, Miss…”

“Kore. Eleni Kore.” she said, the name having no more meaning than any other name she would have made up on the spot years back

“Cygnet Cole,” he extended a hand

Mia did not accept, “ You’ll have to excuse me for not touching hands.”

“Ah, cleanliness.”

“Next to godliness.”

“As I always say. ” his eyes fell on silver token around her neck “ What brings a young woman of the Faith to  Edelstadt, Ms. Kore?”

“Research. I study the undead.”

Dr. Cole made a disgusted noise in his throat “Such vile work for a young woman. I hope I do not disappoint you when I tell you there are none such creatures on the plateau. I believe the only thing Edelstadt could offer to someone in your line of work would be a glimpse into a thriving community of the righteous, and of course a glimpse of our beautiful sunsets.”

Mia nodded and looked in the direction the projection of Dr. Cole was looking. She could see nothing but the deep, layered blackness of the Šumarak, but if she concentrated she could remember the path that the man who had raised her would walk along in the evenings. It was a meandering route, around trees and terrain, and ending at an overlook. One could stand at the edge of it and see for miles; the lowlands with their inky dark soil and thin veins of roads dotted sparsely with homestead, the River Schuyler in the distance, and beyond them the northern span of Vidikovca Ridge looking blue and hazy. It was said on a clear enough day you could see Heaven itself. 

“It’s breathtaking.” Mia said

“You should see our sunrises.”

She glanced at him, straight backed and stern but looking peaceful atop the plateau. It was the last sunset he would see in Edelstadt, and the last sunrise had already unknowingly passed him by. It had been fifteen years to Mia, but to the man she was talking to it had only been four days since the Integration had passed. He was unusually calm given what this meant from them all. The people of the plateau were vampire hunters. They had been ever since they had settled there, a network of communities with a shared divine purpose. It had been the righteous way for as long as any of them could remember, but if the Integration said that the undead had the same rights as the living, it meant hunters were the same thing as murderer. 

Mia wondered if the man she could see standing beside her somehow knew what the dark would bring. They would come for them as they slept. That night Dr. Cole would be arrested for his crimes as young Esinamia pressed herself against the wall upstairs with her small hands wrapped around the silver blade. She had been ready for creatures, terrifying and depraved, not knowing she had been living among monsters all along.


	19. A Working Theory

“If I die like this I’m blaming all of you.” 

“If you die from falling five feet I’m breaking up with you.”

“Light Above, Levi. Just take my fucking hand.”

The young man hanging somewhat precariously from the ladder of fire escape reached up so he and Mia could wrap their palms around each other’s wrists, and the one already situated on the safety balcony pulled the other up to her level.

“Wow, you’re like, really strong.”

“Mia’s a real beast for someone who’ll throw up if she drinks milk.”

“That’s because milk is gross.” she said, scooting over in the small space. They had passed their drinks up first, and now were attempting rearrange Jasna, Ela, Levi, and herself all on the small fire escape off the former’s bedroom window.

Much as Mia had wandered unthinkingly to the Šumarak a few nights prior, she had found herself ordering a pint of hard cider at Ljiljana’s before she had really decided on concrete plans, though this act was more Saturday night muscle memory than some supernatural draw of the dense and lightless grove. Her small group of friends, who Ljiljana’s boyfriend Medo had dubbed ‘the usual suspects’, were gathering on Jasna’s fire escape behind the bar since the picnic tables and seats around the edge of the backyard were already full. Sloane had bailed because she had a date with a dental assistant who seemed boring on social media, and Kit was showing up even later than the Levi because he had gone into Angulem to double check something about his paper; the rising prominence of ult-nat ideology making the young man born and raised an ocean away increasing paranoid.

“Now I get why people don’t climb up here,” the dark haired man said as he peered down over the backyard and the picnic table he had used to reach the ladder.

“Oh, they do,” Jasna said “The rent is so affordable because I’m doing Ljilj a service by kicking kučkin sin off the side of her building while I’m just trying to eat pasta in bed.”

“An unsung hero.” Ela said

“So,” Levi said now, turning away from the yard they were perched above. This had been their drinking spot for a lease and a half now, but it was Ela’s boyfriend’s first time making the climb to the venerated roost “Sloane told me you’re investigating the Necro overdoses?”

“Me?” Mia pointed at her own chest

“Yeah, you are a necrologist.”

“Who studies the undead, not their blood and its misuse outside of medical facilities.” she said “But….we’re maybe a little bit allocating a portion of DANA’s resources to sussing out if the theory about the resurrections is based in any legitimate fact.”

“What theory?” 

“Some people think this whole thing with random OD’s resurrecting isn’t random at all but planned by the LDF. It’s a lot easier to be an ult-nat organization that encourages people to arm themselves with silver bullets against ‘the vampiric threat’ when the public finds vampires threatening. Of course anyone associated with the LDF will point out that they’re called the Living Defense Force so why would they be killing mortals, but they didn’t seem to care too much about the living folks in the buildings around St. Malo’s when they pulled that stunt at the beginning of the summer. And listen, it’s a lot to say that they went from internet trolls to organized killers in the past decade, but, as far as anyone connected to her knows Boskov-Rohl was at most a student who maybe might take a little bit of low potency solarized Necro so she could pull an all nighter during finals week. Her friends don’t even know where she would get that high of a dose of the black stuff. And no one knows a good reason why every single time this happens some red-blooded Laurentian is there with their right to be armed and to shoot a resurrected OD full of silver before they can be anesthetized and quarantined by actual First Responders.”

“Every time except for the Scrugg’s Basin attack.” Jasna said, extending her leg across the metal slats now that Ela had settled herself on Levi’s lap. Mia had her back against the frame of the windows, knees pulled up and resting her pint glass against one. The perspiration of it seeped into the fabric of fitted black jeans as she spoke.

“Scrugg’s Basin was different. We aren’t even including it in our research, at least not for now. It was the first one in Marina, multiple fatalities, the resurrected left perimeter and has never been identified, but it’s not just that. Sloane explains it better but, uh.” she glanced over the edge of the fire escape, the chatter of weekend patrons all mixing together into one unparsable sound “We sort of have a working theory that involves Rearden Briet and the fact that he was saying a bunch of vaguely threatening shit about Queen Ivana around that time.”

“Was he?”

“Yeah. He posted all this crazy stuff on the Feed. Remember this was years before he got into actual politics and maybe nine or ten months before he suddenly became the head figure in this weird cultural pantheon of conservative commentator that hate the monarchy now. But, I mean, regardless of his relative obscurity at the time, it was certainly noticed that a mortal of his affiliations was posting crazy shit about the Queen not knowing her place and there were forces at play that would like, be her demise or something. It’s all deleted now but the Armstrong Agency has everything archived.”

“So how does Scrugg’s Basin play into it?”

“If you were going to hurt the Queen, if these forces at play were going to be in Dva Mosta, wouldn’t it be awful convenient to have almost all of Rockefeller looking in the opposite direction. That shitty studio apartment I lived in with Torin when the attack happened was half a dozen blocks from Scrugg’s Basin, I can say with utmost confidence that it would be incredibly easy to find some destitute vampire that will sell you his blood no questions asked and even easier to find an addict or sex worker who will take whatever blood someone gives him. If you’re already trying to commit regicide why not off some marginalized person no one’s going to report missing, let them terrorize the low neighborhoods of Marina for a few hours, and then let the sun get them in the morning.”

Levi blinked in surprise “Is that what happened? To the vampire, I mean.”

“Yeah, it’s not like, around still.” Mia said “The whole reason the undead are violent when they first rise is because the bane itself is kind of dying. Upir lyssavirus lives off of mortal blood and has already consumed so much of its host that it’s only hope is to resurrect the body and start lashing out at whatever sentient sack of the red stuff it can find.”

“Oh I hate that description of mortals.” Ela made a face as Mia continued

“Their consciousness is in there but it just experienced literally dying, so it’s taking some time to recover in the back seat while the bane’s instinct is behind the wheel, and you know what instinct a virus from the dark plane doesn’t have? Fear of the sun. There were no attacks the next night, so the vampire either degraded with the dawn or it got stuck somewhere where it couldn’t feed and the bane just cannibalized the body.”

“Gnarly.” Levi said “But nothing happened to the Queen. Why would Scrugg’s Basin be a distraction for something that didn’t even happen?”

“Maybe something did happen.” Jasna glanced at Mia “The attack was at the end of August, right? September, October, November, December, January, that’s six months for Učenje plus two more weeks of Oporavak takes us to the second week of February.”

“The week of Stoney’s Ordainment.” Mia nodded “Queen Ivana went well over a century and a half just fine with an heir presumptive in Prince Matija, even though he was apathetic at best about the whole kingship thing, and then all of a sudden she just debuts an heir apparent? There had to be a catalyst for that kind of decision, and unless she completely disregarded tradition and turned Stoney without Učenje it has to have happened real damn close to the time Rearden Briet was implying some pretty threatening shit.”

Jasna shrugged “If any vampire with turned without Učenje it would be him though. I don’t know how he could go through six months of learning what was going to be expected of him once he was turned and still spent that whole year and a half, before the breakup and move out of the city, looking like every experience was wildly new to him.”

“He’s also scuzzy looking.” Levi said, letting his opinion be known despite the audible sigh from all three of the women “What was it that Nevenka Hawthorne got sort of famous for calling him? Something about a cubic zirconia crown on one of those stuffed bear things you could draw on when we were kids, and that looking at him feels like accidentally drinking a warm flat beer that someone put a cigarette out in?”

“Apparently she didn’t get famous enough for you to know that her last name is Hathorne not Hawthorne.”

“You just don’t like her because she’s like the mirror universe you.”

“No she isn’t? What does that even mean?”

“It means she has the same energy as you. She writes like you, she sounds like you, she was one of the pundits on some Pax News show the other day and she even does the same nose wrinkly thing as you, but all her opinions are the opposite of yours.”

“I’m not anything like her.”

“Okay fine.” Levi put his hands up in defense, Mia’s tone having been sharper than either of them expected it to be. “Sorry, she’s a bitch and totally out of line for saying mean things about the Prince even though he looks something that get pulls up when a plumber snakes a clogged bathtub drain.”

“Yeah well, Levi my dear sweet deeply valued friend, you literally look like you’re damp all of the time. You’re a theater school dropout who washes his face with bar soap and is resting on laurels he does not possess.”

“I don’t look damp!”

Ela made a face “Babe, you are kind of oily.”

“This is slander.” he muttered, wiping the sheen off the sides of his nose “And I think you’re a little biased in the Prince’s direction, Mia, judging by the fact that you’re calling him just Stoney like he’s a buddy of yours.”

“Maybe he is, what of it?”

Levi’s mouth moved into an expression that faltered in uncertainty “You just….the thing at that club was for the case, like we all get that. We’re not judging you for using your looks to get ahead in your career but you’re not….you’re not actually into him….right?”

Just beyond the edge of Levi’s vision, Jasna and Ela exchanged the glances. It was a look they had shared before, as if to commemorate the last moment of the time when only the women in their group of friends knew a particular morsel of information.

“What if I was?” she shrugged

“Mia!” he said in the type of tone that he likely would have stood if he was not on a fire escape with his girlfriend in his lap “He’s a monarch!”

“Really? I hadn’t noticed.” she laughed “But actually I kind of haven’t. Not to say that he’s shirking his obligations as heir, but anything that prevents him from sitting around playing video games in his underwear is something he’s not too hot on.”

“A leader should be elected by the people who she or he leads!” Levi said, his normally calm tone now reaching a point of exasperation “Unified Laurentia was founded on that ideal!”

“Yeah, it was also founded on vampire being second class citizens and Bijeli Krajl had to annex a port city just so the huddled masses yearning to be free didn’t get slaughtered while they were waiting three hundred and seventy nine years for the Integration to happen.”

“You say that like people were still hunting vampires up until fifteen years ago. And don’t act like those crazy zealots that believed in a great war between the living and undead were a common thing; just because a forest cult or something got their supplies from the same town as your community doesn’t-”

“Jasna?” a voice from below broke through the chatter “Jasna, draga moja?”

“Da?” 

“Visoki dečko je tu da vam se pridruži.” Ljiljana answered

“Pošalji ga….um….” she made a face trying to think of the word she needed “Kit! Get your ass up here.”

Kit laughed from below “Yes ma’am.”

“Mm, I love it when you call me ma’am.” she called down “Levi, you’re also my dear sweet valued friend but if I have two men on my fire escape talking about how Bijeli Kralj’s system of inherited sovereignty is unconstitutional by way of a document that was written by a bunch of fucks that didn’t even consider vampires real Laurentians, we’re going to have to use thing thing for it’s intended purpose because I’d light both of you on fire.”


	20. A Bro Night in Black Dirt

The upcoming ice cream social had been posted on the Dwell™ community board for a week before a resident whose name Mia could not remember decided she would personally invite the necrologist to the frozen dessert based gathering. Already well on her way to missing the last train before being late for work, Mia had given some mumbled deflection about her dietary restrictions and then promptly put the event out of her mind. She did not think about it again until another week later when she came home from a day of work to find the island and eating bar of the communal kitchen turned into a frozen dessert buffet complete with a not insignificant selection of non-dairy options.

Kit caught her eye as Mia did her best to slink around the shelves and fake architectural accents that separated the former warehouse into something that felt more like reasonable living spaces. Without words they exchanged glances and he did his own act of stealth, slipping out of a conversation about the latest vape detox trend so that he could make Mia a bowl. She had put down her things and settled into her Cube just as he knocked on the sliding door.

“Vegan chocolate-hazelnut ice cream, crushed caramel stroopwafels, salted pistachios, and a generous drizzle of marshmallow sauce.”

“Oh, fuck yeah. Hvala te.” 

Kit half laughed and handed her the carefully crafted sundae “I’ve been thinking a lot about the myths of eternal punishment lately, you know, hell and the like.”

“Sure, that tracks.”

“I think, em, eternal suffering, for me at least, would be existing forever in the state between having let someone down and their realization of that failure. Hell seems like less of a firey pit and more standing at the mouth of one knowing your only way to forgiveness is to descend to the deepest part of guilt.”

“Yeah?”

“Mm. And I think your hell would be taking a half day off work and accidentally walking into an ice cream social.”   

“Looks like it.” she said “My hell is turning down an invitation and still feeling like I’m expected to participate because someone went out of their way to get almond and soy and coconut ice cream just for my benefit.”

“Lydia and Sre’s benefit too, they’re both vegans.” he said, resting his shoulder against her door frame “And I suspect Ainslie gets off on being visibly inclusionary, or at least the esteem it warrants. I also suspected that you’d be in need of some marshmallow after the day that I suspect you’ve had.”

Mia nodded in response. It had not been breaking news, both because it did not break and because it was not news, but a gossip blogger who went by @brykynli_hotgoss on the Feed had posted pictures of the crop top wearing, spine tattoo having, short haired necrologist anyway. Mia had been leaning on the bar at Ljiljana’s, chatting with Medo and fulfilling her duty of getting the next round during their night of fire escape drinks. The blogger had not needed to look twice to realize she was sharing a barroom with the same woman who had been tangled up with the Prince weeks before. @brykynli_hotgoss had caught Mia’s face too, snapping a few pictures from this angle before uploading them to the Feed. The post had simmered in the singular space of the platform for a day and a half before Rockefeller’s leading tabloid had picked up the story for themselves. By the time Mia went to work that afternoon the pot had boiled over and her peaceful anonymity had evaporated. 

“I suspect your suspicions were correct,” she said and swallowed a bite of non-dairy ice cream “Dušan linked me the article this afternoon. The Brat’s Buzzcut Babe, I guess it isn’t the worst thing a tabloid could call me.”

“It’s misogynistic.”

“Of course it’s misogynistic, it’s PopPress.” she said, thinking that this might as well be their tagline “The whole clickability of the story hinges on the sexist notion that I exist solely in the context of my relationship to Stoney. He wasn’t even there for Light’s sake.”

“Is that what it said? That you exist like that?”

“Not in so many words, but they had their team of unpaid interns track down my first and last name and still I’m referred to as a possession more than I am a person.” she said “Did you not notice that as you read it.”

“I didn’t read it.” Kit shook his head “I wanted to respect your privacy.”

“Well, you have my permission.” she said “It’s not a very good read though. Mostly pictures and a vague implication that as much as Arborae has made a name for herself outside of the Dobrogost clan, she is one of theirs, they do oversee Little Serbia, and Ljiljana’s is in fact in Litter Serbia, and doesn’t that sound like a potential powderkeg of hashtag drama.”

“Who’s Arborae?”

“Vampire, turned during the latter bit of the Common Era not because she was something special and destined but because the Dobrogost have a long tradition of providing lady’s maids to the Guiscard clan. Still, times changed, she made her worth known, and since the Integration she been a professional art buyer and curator in the Granite District. It’s a real rags to Rothko story. I’ve interviewed her twice, once when I was shadowing Anto at the Order and then once when I was doing my JV-92 requisites. Her home is beautiful, so is she. She’s kind, accommodating. I’ve never had anything bad to say about her except maybe that she dipped out of the public eye with suspicious swiftness after her breakup a few years back, though in her defense it was a breakup with the heir to the throne of Rockefeller.”

“Oh.” Kit blinked “And now you’re….and he’s….right. I get it.”

“Yeah. I don’t care though.”

“You don’t care about Stoney’s ex girlfriend?”

“No,” she scoffed “Why would I?”

“Because you’re trying to write a piece on him and if she ‘dipped out of the public eye with suspicious swiftness’ that sounds like something you should mention if you want your work to end up in one of those big old books.” Kit said, motioning to the stack of handwritten tomes that Mia had brought home after her half day at the office.

“Oh! Right, yeah, for the tomes, of course, I mean, yeah.”

Kit did his best not to laugh “What did you think I was talking about?”

“Nothing. Šuti. Don’t you have some girl to charm with your stupid accent and towering height?” she asked, making a shooing motion with her hand

“Maybe. Anja, who organized all this, did share a beanbag with me and played with my hair a little bit during last week’s movie night. I should see if she needs help, em, doing the ice cream things. Would I be correct in supposing that you’ll be fine here with your tomes?”

“I suppose so.” she said, and Kit stood up straight, giving her a small parting wave and sliding her Cube door closed.

His footsteps faded down the corridor and Mia opened one of the thick, leather bound books. It was the handwritten accounts of a long disbanded group of necrologists who had tasked themselves with recording everything that was known about the Pavelu clan of Croix-Collines. While other tomes had been transcribed to printed text and then to digital this one had sat forgotten, largely because the last of the Pavelu vampires had been hunted to extinction some two centuries prior. She logged into DANA’s remote archive, pulled her keyboard onto her lap, and settled back into her pile of pillows to work in the kind of quiet she had not been afforded in the office earlier. 

The seven foot long and wide Cube that was hers and hers alone was surprisingly sound dampening when shut, and without an exterior wall for a window it’s light was provided only by the diffused light in the hallway and the LEDs recessed behind the panels of her ceiling. Hours past, what little she could hear of the common area of Dwell™ fading and then turning into sparse conversation and water running as the party came to an end. The remnants of her ice cream melted in its bowl and Mia considered ordering dinner from Burek Express only to remember that the one closest to Dwell™ had upped their delivery minimum and it was not worth ordering three sides of sour cream just so she could get pita delivered to her. She put off eating as if another option would eventually present itself.

Her phone, which had vibrated near constantly when PopPress published Mia’s name, had calmed to the occasional buzz of normal conversation by the evening. She left it on the charging dock, instead glancing up at the banner notifications that took up their slice of the large monitor that had come with the Cube. She typed steadily as she turned the brittle pages of the tome, the sound of party clean up stopped at some point and when Mia took notice of this she realized it was past nightly quiet hours and she was still hungry. She found a date bar on the shelf where she kept her pouches of microwave quinoa and chocolate cashews and ate this for dinner, crumpling the wrapper in her hand just as her banner notification showing an incoming call from the vampire Wesson. 

“Sanja®️, accept video call.”

“Accepting video call.” an artificial voice replied as the lights in her pod glowed cyan for a moment. The text document on her screen minimized, being replaced by a window formatted for the vertical aspect ratio for a phone. On the other side of the line was the friend of Stoney who she had met at the club in Eastside and had made frequent appearances in the Brat Prince’s entourage of užasno djeca.

“Hey,” she said “What’s up?”

“Hi. Scale of one to ten, how lucky would you say you are?”

“Oh, uh, probably in the negative but I did get an onion ring in an order of fries recently.”

“Nice.” he said “Here’s the sitch, we’re getting our ass kicked out here and my boy needs a good luck charm for the second half of the game. How are you with cartography?” 

“Surprisingly good, actually.” she asked, just now noticing a splatter of oily orange paint on the side of his neck “What game are you playing?”

“Capture the flag.” 

At this Wesson panned the camera around and she could tell by the trees and the vantage point from which they overlooked the River Schuyler that he was somewhere on the Prince’s estate in Black Dirt. The night was dark and dotted with stars, but the vampire was situated under the lights of an open air pavilion beside a tennis court. Stoney had mentioned during one of their meandering conversation that he was thinking of having the hardcourt torn up and turned into somewhere he could teach himself to skateboard, but for now it was serving purpose as a parking lot for a trio of four-wheeler and a place to put a keg. He propped his phone on something and gave her a view of the folding table at the center structure, on which was a topographical map of the Prince’s property and several painted figurines that could be moved around like a medieval war strategy. This was not the only token of a long since bygone era present at their halftime regrouping; just beyond the pavilion she could see his two teammates dressed in shining links of matching hauberks.

“You wear chainmail for capture the flag?”

“We take Bro Night very seriously.” he said, and had barely finished his sentence before he was met with a chanting chorus of ‘Bro night! Bro night! Bro night!’ from his teammates. At the sound of this Clegane howled, only his glowing ember eyes visible as roamed freely around the estate. “Speaking of, you two fucks want to get some planning done or are we going to get our asses handed to us again?”

A mortal who Mia did not know by name groaned and then looked at Stoney, who shrugged and put down the hose of the beer keg he had been drinking directly from. While Wesson called, the Brat Prince had been sitting sidesaddle on his four-wheeler, a paintball gun rested across his thigh and a cigarette tucked behind his ear. He stood when summoned, popping the cigarette in his mouth and striking a match on the sole of the tactical military boots his pants were tucked into. Mia remember for a moment what Dr. Cole had said about the way the undead moved, lithe and almost gliding in their approach, as fluid as the slither of the Serpent of Temptation. He had said it was a false elegance, a guise meant to trick a mortal into thinking that the undead were some heavenly creature. When Stoney walked it was with the sort of graceless gait of someone who looked to be realizing the length of his own legs in real time.

“Who you talking to?” he asked, only able to see the back of Wesson’s phone as he sauntered into the covered structure.

“I’m talking to Rockefeller’s most highly venerated necrologist.”

The bridge of Stoney’s nose wrinkled as he scowled “What? Someone at the Order’s got your number? Tell them I got something they can venerate right here.”

With this he widened his stance, slouching and thrusting his hips forward, waving a pair of middle fingers at the center of his crotch for the camera to see. He stuck out his tongue as he did so, rolling his eyes so only the whites of them were visible and making a sound that was more about being crude than coherent.

“Actually it’s Mia, and if you want her to venerate you dick I prefer you didn’t do it while we’re in the middle of a game.”

“It’s- oh fuck,” he stood up straight and snatched the camera off it’s prop. It was an uncommon occurrence for a vampire’s blood to move through their body, the bane being the kind of virus that could animate it’s host largely without the help of sanguineous functions. Only the most fundamental of capacities were preserved after death. No color flushed Stoney’s cheeks as he turned the camera to face him but he seemed to be blushing regardless.  

“You do know that ‘venerate’ means like, regarding with great respect, right?”

“Mm, yeah, bet, I know lots of word.” he said, putting his thumb over the microphone for a moment as he turned his face to burp “Sorry. I’m drunk.”

“Yeah, I sort of assumed by the way you were suckling off that keg and the fact that your reaction to the very notion of necrology was uh, less that polite.”

He made a sheepish, shrugging expression “I could be polite for you, a good boy you can take home to Ma? I'll call your daddy ‘sir’ and everything.”

“Gross.” she laughed “It’s fine though, I’m well aware of what the so called Brat Prince thinks of people in my line of work. What I did take offense at was that you thought the most highly venerated necrologist in the city would work at the Order, when clearly it’s Gin Nikolić who writes for the Carter Association.”

“Nikolić….she tried to interview me a couple times.”

“No way.”

“Mm, yes way.” 

“She’s so fucking good at her job, it’s crazy. And Sloane has such a crush on her that it’s contagious.” Mia laughed “It’s a good thing sexuality doesn’t actually work like that because she gets so obsessed with powerful women that I’d be like, contact bisexual by now.”

Stoney shrugged “It ain’t half bad to be.”

“Sure, yeah, of course.” she said “Totally cool.”

“Cool.” 

He half smiled and started to walk out from under the pavilion with Wesson’s phone. Past the tennis court and far from the strategy board she had apparently been called to weigh in on, was an expanse of lawn that was torn up with four-wheeler tracks and Clegane’s massive paws. In the grass they had set up a number of target, propped up boards covered in larger than life print out of now paint splattered faces, as he passed she saw a few of them in the headlights of the vehicle pointing towards them. Radio host conspiracy theorist turned ult-nat politician Rearden Briet, an online blogger named Roko LeBlanc who had gone viral with a post in which he said Stoney looked like he had crawled out of a putrified grease trap and probably smelled like it too, and conservative political commentator Nevenka Hathorne. 

“Hey, about that thing that happened with PopPr-”

“Don’t worry about it.” she cut him off “It’s a miracle I preserved my anonymity as long as I did. And as much as you dislike the Order, the fact that I still have connections within the agency is probably what kept my name out of PopPress’s mouth in the first place.”

“I hate that it like that.” he shook his head as he stepped over a low wall of stones and sat down in sooty dark dirt on the other side of it “Everything I do they gotta pick at it like they vultures or something.”

 “Is that why you moved out there?”

He rested his head against the stack of rocks “I just don’t want them doing it to you.”

“I appreciate the sentiment, Stoney, but I did make the choice to mix my professional life with my….personal life. When Boldizsár denied me an official meeting and then you invited me to that club anyway, I knew what I was doing. I’ve never been naïve in this.”

“Never?”

Mia shook her head “I walked into this thing with my eyes wide open.”

“Why’d you do it then?”

“I had a hunch it was something worth pursuing.”

“But I ain’t even gave you an interview yet.”

“Mm, I wasn’t really talking about the interview.”

“Yeah?” he smirked “What was you talking about?”

“Oh, I was talking about playing Rub Univerzuma with you,” she laughed “The moment you told me you played Scoundrel class but you had maxed out your charm and luck so that you had nothing left over for stealth or intuition I knew that you needed a Scout’s help to survive outside of the Praxis System and I needed those off-ship experience points so I could unlock the Star Guild features.”

“Scoundrels don’t need no Scouts with them. I just like playing with you.”

“Mm, maybe a Scoundrel played by someone that knows how to balance their stats but, I hate to break it to you babe, that’s not you.”

“Šuti.” he rolled his eyes and Mia laughed “What are you up to tonight?”

“I took some tomes home with me. Transcribing is the easiest way to get overtime pay without doing a whole lot of work. How’s your paintball capture the flag going?”

“Good if you rooting for Flint and Jace and Brando. Shit if you’re rooting for me and Wesson and Zeke. I’m a bad shot and a good target.”

“I don’t think I’ve met Zeke yet.”

“Oh word?” he pushed himself up and called over the wall “Yo Zeke! Yo! C’mere! Come say hi to my lady!”

The camera faced nothing in particular for several seconds and Mia, sitting crosslegged in her bed in front of the monitor, took a moment to make sure the horseshoe shaped piercing in her septum was not askew and that her tank top was not sitting too low on her chest.

“Hi Stoney’s lady.” the smiling mortal said as he vaulted over the rock wall and flicked his head back to shake away a dread that had fallen forward “What’s good?”

“Mia.” she said, correcting what he had addressed her as

“Ezekiel Aleksandar Hamilton.”

“Oh, we’re doing full names? Esinamia Castitas Whitt.”

“Damn,” he made a show of looked around “Are you out here in Black Dirt with us cause that name’s vukojèbina as fuck.”

“Mm, you guys are a little far for me to visit. Stoney said he’s north of the Borovi Grad train station and if I had to guess I’d say that those lights by the water are Faroe, which is at least two and a half hours away from central Angulem, three or three and a half if we’re talking about my part of Marina.”

“She’s got you all figured out guy.” he turned to Stoney and then stood up “You gonna spend all night talking to your draga or are we gonna get some strategy done?”

“Jebi se, I’ll be there when I get there.” he made a swatting motion as Zeke walked away, and a moment later it was just the two of them, a few hundred miles apart but sitting as if they were facing each other. They had discovered one brightening dawn when they had both gone to bed but neither could sleep, that Stoney tended to curl up on his left side and Mia preferred to fall asleep on her right. When each held their phone out it was as if they were lying across from the other one. “Three and a half hours, really?”

“Mhm, it’s like forty five minutes from Little Serbia to Callowhill Station.”

“Right, yeah.” he nodded “Eid’s in a couple weeks….you get a long weekend for it?”

“Of course, it’s a bank holiday.”

Stoney put his hand to his mouth, a short fingernail of already chipped red nail polish between his teeth as he muttered his words “It don’t take so long in a car.”

“Most things don’t.”

“I was thinking I might be in Rockefeller for Eid weekend but I don’t know now that they trying to make a story outta you and me. I don’t think we could hang out.”

“Oh. Right. Um, yeah, that uh- that makes sense.”

“So I was thinking maybe you could come here instead.”

Mia’s heart felt as if it had jumped against her ribcage “To Black Dirt?”

“That’s where my house is, yeah.” he smiled and then the expression faltered at the sight of her not sharing it “You don’t wanna?”

“No! I do, I’m just trying to work it out in my head because I have one paycheck before the holiday and then rent and a student loan payment which leaves me kind of tight but I think I can take the commuter rail out of the city and then see if there’s a bus I can take because that might be cheaper than the inter-city rail.”

“Mia, no. I’ll have a driver bring you up.” 

“Oh! Right, that’s what you meant about a car. Okay, yeah that’s, that works.”

“You didn’t think I’d invite you out and not take care of you, did you?” he asked “I can take care of those loans too if you want.”

“Can you take care of the fact that my boss is going to kill me if I come back from a long weekend at the Brat Prince’s house without an interview.”

“Sure.”

“Yeah? How are you going to do that?”

“I’ll give you an interview.”

“Oh.” she said, the sound small and high as it came out of her mouth. If her heart had hit against her chest a moment ago now it seemed as if it was breaking through her very skeleton. 

“Yeah. Fuck it. I trust you.”

“Okay, okay, wow, Light Above,” she pressed her fingers to the sides of her temple “Eid weekend, right? Okay. I have to write interview questions and, okay, well, Sloane would have to come because we have to do photos for the spread and that means wardrobe because you can’t just wear anything and, and, um….”

“Hey, Mia.” he said “Take a breath. You wanna talk to Lux about it? She ain’t on my payroll for nothing you know. She’s good at this shit.”

“Yeah. Fuck, sorry, I just, you said you wouldn’t even give an interview to Gin Nikolić and I was like ‘okay, well there goes my last shred of hope for ever closing this assignment’ and I was just processing that and I- you’re not just saying this because you’re drunk right?”

“I swear to the Light Above.” he said “Or Veliona, Warden of Souls, Goddess of Death or whatever my undead ass is supposed to swear on.”

“Veliona,” she said “If you were of Faith when you were mortal she’s the goddess that kept your immortal soul out of the Fires of the Abyss while you between death and resurrection, and who you humble yourself to during every Svetkovina.”

“I haven’t done a Svetkovina in years,” he said, having paused the video so he could type something on screen “I’m forwarding you Lux’s number.”

“Thanks, and yeah, I know you haven’t because you love pissing off Prince Matija and the rest of the traditionalist in your clan.”

“Nah, that ain’t it. Veliona ain’t got my soul no more.”

“What? No. The tomes mention some of the Old Ones buying themselves back but that’s, I mean, who knows if that’s real or mythology. You can’t have done it yourself.”

“Of course not.” he said as the pinging sound of an incoming text accompanied a banner notification on Mia’s screen “I never sold her my soul in the first place.”

“What. Stoney. You’re a vampire, you can’t own your own soul.”

“I’m the Brat Prince.” he said, the video resuming to show a wicked little grin spreading across his face “I do whatever I want.”

“Fuck.”

Stoney laughed and looked behind him “Okay, I think I really gotta go and give Wesson his phone back. I’ll call you again before you go to bed?”

“Of course, yeah.”

Stoney smiled “I’m really glad I’m gonna see you.”

“Me too.” she looked at him for a moment. His head was still tilted back against the low wall, with a grin so self-assured it was almost a sneer, mussed up curls, and a face that was almost completely in shadow save for the way his eyes seemed to shine in the dark. In two and a half weeks she would be in Black Dirt, under the expanse of stars and with the only vampire she had ever know to, apparently, own his own soul.

 “Talk to you later.” he said

“Yeah. Talk to you later.”


	21. Stars

Mia had spent holiday weekends outside of Rockefeller dozens of times over. Ela’s parents had a house that was walking distance from a public beach in coastal Chersonese, and Jasna regularly decided she wanted to be the kind of person that rented cabins up north and made s’mores in their riverstone fireplaces. This trip was further than both of those, though. It was not quite as far into Black Dirt as the plateau but Stoney had told her it was about a two hour drive past city limits when he had decided to get them a driver instead of bothering with the train that ran through the lokaliteti that shared a boarder.

Mia and Sloane met their driver in front of the office in the last hours of Thursday's daylight, figuring if they were going to be passing off the long weekend as a purely professional work trip they might as well keep up appearances while they were still in Rockefeller. The luxury SUV, two necrologists, a chauffeur of few words, a pair of weekend bags, and a camera bag, all made their way north along the gridded streets of Angulem. At the top of the island they came to a bridge, over which they passed with no incident, and when the car tires were on solid ground again, they were in Black Dirt. They said it was a freer place out here, which for the first twenty meant it was a good place to locate your car dealerships, appliance showrooms, and anything else too sprawling to be viable in the city. If Rockefeller was the center of the world, the living embryo that birthed all worthwhile art and culture, then southern Black Dirt was the egg white surrounding it’s yolk. It provided the city with the resource of products and people, and left a tacky residue on all who ran their fingers through it. 

There was some feeling that came up in Mia’s chest as the city thinned out and it became clear that all this has been as densely forested as the Šumarak before they had built up towers and plazas on it’s granite foundation, but she did not have the words to tell Sloane was this feeling was. Instead she pointed out a lonely double occupancy mini-mall that passed on their left side that contained her favorite strange pairing of businesses, a somewhat rundown sex shop called Romantic Depot, and the equally disrepair pet store called Exotic Birds Unlimited.

“Cockatoos and cocks for two.” Sloane had said “Maybe we should stop by. It’s only polite to bring a few dildos to an orgy.”

“We’re not-” Mia laughed and pinched the bridge of her nose in mock frustration “We’re not going to a vampire orgy.”

“You think some rich undead aristocrat invited you and your breathtakingly beautiful best friend to his secluded mansion not to have at least a little bit of group sex?”

“First of all, yeah, I can say with confidence that he’s not interest in that and secondly, Stoney knows you’re a lesbian so like, why would he even think of you in that context?”

“When has being a lesbian even stopped a dude from thinking he could fuck me?” she shrugged and then reached into her bag. On top of her clothes and toiletries was a bag of cookies that claimed to be baklava flavored but really tasted more like artificial sweeteners and dust. She pulled the top of it open and tipped it towards Mia “At the very least, you’re about t-minus two and a half hours from getting it on with a creature that doesn’t experience fatigue so, better carb up.” 

Mia had rolled her eyes and taken a handful of the poorly flavored cookies, eating them with the thought that she had while eating anything that had come from the shelves of a radnja. They were not necessarily good, but she would shove handfuls into her mouth until she and Sloane had polished off the entire bag. By the time her friend rolled up the empty bag and put it back into her pack they were somewhere else all together. Just as Rockefeller was separated into parts by its geography, so was the lokalitet to its north. They were in the hills now. Low, round topped ridges lined the road in either direction, the close ones a dark coniferous green and the further ones turning blue as they layered with the sky. They were deceptive in their gentleness, as almost all things in Black Dirt were, an unsure foot would slip as easily as an overly assured one in the bed of fallen pine needles and fine soil. There were places in the hills that had not been stepped on at all; they were spots inaccessible or recently turned over, or possibly neither and had avoided the footfall of man only by chance. 

There was something fascinating about this latter possibility as Mia looked out onto the passing landscape. She had thought about this often as a child, as she and the others that she had grown up with ran through the woods, climbing up on the highest stones they could find. One was Emaleigh’s, another was Loell’s, Nevie and Konnor pushed each other for the most coveted outcropping until one won out. Mia had found a perch close to a cache of ammo for when they began defending their claims by throwing acorns around the ravine. She was still calling herself by her given name then, and when she stood up on a stone she decided that it was called Esinamia’s Crag, because surely they were so deep in the woods that no one had ever stood here before. She was the explorer and conqueror. 

She had never felt this way in Rockefeller. Mia could not convince herself that she was the first to touch a rock when that rock had already been carved into a street curb and that curb had been worn perfectly smooth by thousands and thousands of feet. The lokalitet’s population was creeping up towards the ten million mark, all stacked and cubed on top of each other in a mere two hundred square miles. There was not an inch of land left in the city that had not been passed over by countless footsteps long before Mia had arrived there.

Night had started to fall as they ate their cookies and by the time they saw the high southern peak of Vidikovca Ridge it was silhouetted by stars.

“I love stars.” Mia said, having had her cheek rested against the glass for a while now “I don’t miss anything about Black Dirt like I miss how dark the sky is.”

“Reminds me of visiting my dad’s place.” Sloane said “Stars and white people. What is it about white people and having a huge boner for stars?”

“Oh, are you for real asking me?”

“Yeah, you’re my sleeper agent, my white people spy.”

“I’m not a sleeper agent.” she said, leaning her head back against the leather seats and watching the stars through sunroof above them “But you should probably try to get a little nap in if you want to be on the same sleep schedule as Stoney and Lux. Flint and Brando said they were going to be around this weekend and so would Wesson.”

“Look at you, already friends with your vampire boyfriend’s friends. Didn’t I tell you the problem with Torin’s friends was that they sucked and were boring and had nothing to do with you being ‘not normal’ or whatever gaslighting bullshit he fed you.”

“Stoney’s not my boyfriend.” she said 

“He’s not?” Sloane gave her a sly look

“Nope. I wouldn’t be able to work on his case if he was.”

“Alright.” the look did not leave her face, but she settled on this answer “Give me your flannel, I forgot to bring my neck pillow.”

Mia leaned forward and pulled off the thrifted men’s shirt she had put over her high neck halter top. Her friend twisted it into a snake, doubled it over, and bunched up the fabric between her shoulders and jaw. A quick invocation later, and she was fully asleep.

A dark glass barrier that could be adjusted at the passenger’s will separated the necrologists from their driver the car felt quiet with the exception of Sloane’s steady breath. She unlooped her headphones from where they were knotted around the strap of her sling bag, waited a moment for them to recognize her phone as the audio they should connect too, and rode the rest of the way watching corners of constellations pass by through the glass above them. 

An hour after they had crossed from Rockefeller to Black Dirt the driver took an exit for a towering white bridge that emerged out of the trees to cross the River Schuyler and then dip back into them on the eastern ridge. They were off the parkway now and for what felt like a long while they were on a single road that was lined in either directions by trees that went on so far that it seemed hard to imagine there was anything in the world but trees. Mia’s ears popped as they doubled back on roads that took them up to the highlands until they turned onto another smaller road that they soon realized was a long driveway. The stopped in front of a large gate that was still monogrammed with the initials of the oil baron who had built the estate. Stoney had told her one night that the wealthy tycoon had been at the height of his riches when the petroleum mold had hit and faced with the prospect of losing everything, he had chose the express route and put a revolver in his mouth. A rumor in town has said that the fatal gun had never been recovered, but Stoney gone through every inch of the house in the years since he had bought it and never found the weapon.

“Slo,” she pushed her friend’s shoulder and woke her up as the car stopped for a moment and the gates opened up “We’re here.”

“Hmm? Oh.” she blinked and looked at her friend “Are you nervous?”

“What? No.” Mia scoffed as they passed smaller buildings, cottages and horse stable and miscellaneous workshops that dotted the property “Why would I be fucking, why would I, šuti. I’m not nervous.”

“Yeah you are.”

“Am not.” she said, narrowing her eyes at her friend who did the same to her. They held their glaring contest, both trying to smile or blink, as their path rounded a quatrefoil shaped lily pond that had begun to overgrow as nature fought its way over the concrete sides. Behind Mia’s shaved head a châteauesque mountain house came into view. The oil baron had built his manor to be a the facsimile of a castle, incongruously ornamented by the elaborate towers, spires, and steeply-pitched, though stylistically it’s asymmetrical plan could not be pinpointed as fully Gothic or Renaissance in aesthetic. It was ostentatious to an almost vulgar extent; Stoney had not been able to resist the opportunity to be it’s second owner. 

Now groups of people gathered on balconies, the front doors opened and a man stumbled out to cross their path on his way to lean over the edge of the lily pond. As the man vomited into the stagnant water another SUV pulled up and deposited a half dozen women in the circular driveway. They walked into the house together with all the confidence of people who were not strangers to the Brat Prince’s mansion.

“Are you nervous because he’s having a whole ass party you didn’t mention to me?”

“I didn’t- I….I, um, I don’t-”

“That fucking idiot. He didn’t even tell you this was a party, did he?”

“No.”

“Wow. I hope that asshole had fun being dead the first time because I’m about to murder the heir of Rockefeller.”


	22. No Witch Shit in the House

If the interview with the Brat Prince was going to be on par with the sort of work that the Order and other notable necrology agencies produced, Mia would have to bring a photographer along, or at least this was what they had pitched to Mads so that she would condone two of DANA’s three employees expensing a weekend in Black Dirt. There would likely not be much to expense though, Stoney had told them that he was hosting them for the three nights. A few days after Sloane had made a passing comment about her pursuit of jamón ibérico, the Brat Prince had been spotted in a Rockefellian import store purchasing an entire leg of cured ham. As they had neared the Prince’s estate Sloane had been thinking increasingly of the air dried sea salt preserved meat of a black pig raised on a mountain side and a diet of acorns, but the fancy ham was pushed to the back of her mind when Mia gripped her friend's hand so firmly she threatened to bruise it.

"I- I can't go inside." she said breathlessly, as if she had just ran a marathon instead of walking a few yards up Stoney's sweeping driveway

Sloane nodded. They did not need to step through the flung open front doors to see the gallery of strangers and champagne inside. The celebration was lavish and chaotic, as if the agreed upon theme of the night had simply been excess and every attendee had interpreted this differently. Music blared, a vampire perched on the upper bannister of the double height entry hall jumped down and landed inches from a server who startled and spilled his tray, a woman who had been compelled to climb up on a table the moment she had straighten up from a line of cocaine now crouched so someone could tilt the last drops of a vial of Necroblood into her mouth. A bicycle that had been chrome coated and outfitted with a small motor navigated through the crowd and the a floor full of their detritus, the driver slumped sideways off it and the modified bike careened into a bronze sculpture of a peacock. Sloane looked away from the golden glow of inside and at the night they were still standing in. Without the city around them there was nothing but blackness. "Where- I mean, you can't just stay out here."

"Rose garden." she said "There's a garden by the tennis courts. I just, need to be alone."

"Mia you're going to get eaten by a fucking bear if you're alone out here."

She shook her head and chewed her lip with such dedication it was a surprise she wasn't hurting herself. As party guests spilled out of the house so did waiters, and Mia took a delicate fluted glass in each hand, draining them and place them back on the server's tray. "Ugh, champagne tastes like pee. You know what a bear wouldn't eat?"

"Someone full of champagne like a fleshly piss ravioli?"

"Exactly." Mia managed to laugh despite her breathlessness

“Fine, but hey, listen to me, I love you and my phone is right here in my hand if you need me, alright?”

“Yeah, love you too.”

She squeezed her friend hand again and the two necrologist split off. Mia was not made for the chaos of parties, and Sloane was not made to be anywhere other than the kitchen, as kitchens were where entire legs of jamón ibérico de bellota tended to reside. With one more look in the direction of where Mia had gone, perhaps more for her own reassurance than her friend’s, Sloane stepped inside to try her own hand at the night of indulgence the Brat Prince was offering. She was not a stranger to house parties. She had grown up in the lokalitet north-east of Rockefeller, and though the Gao family never had the waterfront wealth of some people in Chersonese, their eldest daughter had never experience a lack of oversized beach houses to trash while her classmates' parents were away. It was not the willowy women dancing on tables and slack jawed young men that disoriented Sloane here, but the fact that Prince Stoney’s estate made the grand houses of Chersonese look like shacks. Each space she walked through seemed to be a bigger than the last, and even the corridors and galleries that connected them were decorated with rich wood floors, wainscotting, and damask wallpaper. As she left one barrel vaulted hall she was dumped into a circular antechamber that led, as she had hoped, into the massive kitchen of the soaring, wood timber beamed great room.

An island of mahogany and honed stone so big that two grown men could not touch hands across it was spread with every canapé and meze she could think of. The were blinis topped with caviar and vol-au-vent of foie gras, pâté, carpaccio of venison, fine cheeses, and roasted figs. One guest was having himself an entire meal of mignonette sauce and oysters on the half shell. Among the epicurean amuse-bouches were even more that seemed more to the Prince’s personal taste; chicken tenders and wings, garlic knots, burek, jalapeño poppers, ćevapi, sarma, and what seemed to be an edible log cabin constructed of mozzarella sticks. Still, as she scanned the counter she could not find even a slice of jamón ibérico. 

It would take far more than the absence of gourmet cured ham or even the most poorly timed blunder of a party possible to turn Sloane against someone who Mia held so favorably, but Stoney was currently outside of her good graces. A much as her friend enjoyed someone who she would video call just to see who could give themselves more double chins when they held their phones at a low angle did not mean that he wasn't just another idiot boy who did not listen. As she looked around for something other than her missing ham, a vampire from the club in Eastside who had introduced himself as Kofi came into view. He was drifting through the party on a skateboard, weaving around people with a look as if each of their presences surprised him, but did not bother him. When he came upon the island of food he regarded it with the same passive curiosity.

“Huh,” he pointed at the spread and looked up at Sloane “Chicken wings.”

“Yeah. Hey, where's Stoney?”

“What day is it?”

“Uh, Thursday, maybe Friday by now? One of the two.”

“One of the seven.” he said, tapping the side of his head “Stoney should be upstairs.”

“Thanks.” she said, though Kofi had already redirected his attention to a potato chip that was seemingly a pleasant new experience for him.

There had been a staircase in the entry hall but there was another one in the kitchen, because a house as sizable as this one was not complete without a second flight tucked away beside a breakfast nook large enough that it constituted being called a morning room. The stairs led her up to the second level of the great room, an arcade of sorts with it’s own smaller kitchen that was serving as storage for plastic video game guitars. There were bedrooms and hallways off of it, dozens of on-suite bathrooms and small recesses along the way that had brass picture light for artwork that Stoney had never bothered to fill the niches with. Sloane forwent the halls and instead squeezed through the people who were passing in and out of the double doors on to the loggia. She had heard chatter from the deep, covered veranda and picked out the unique cadence of a voice that spoke with a just barely recognizable Croix-Collines accent. Stoney stood at the end of a fine mahogany dining table, cigarette bobbing in his mouth as he rapped along to the music cranked up loud for those who were in and around the pool below.

“Sweeter than crème brûlée, presidential head of state, dopest mothafucka since before I hit the seventh grade, elevate, Buddha shit, cooler than what coolest is,”

As Sloane stepped out he poised his entire body to send a ball sailing into a red cup; the table meant for gourmet dining having been repurposed for beer pong. This anachronism of furniture and utility was not the most cacophonic bit of visual information around Stoney, as he seemed to be dressed as if he was a randomized video game character. He grinned with gold teeth and wore a too big sports jersey; this was tucked into a pair of patterned dress pants that were surprisingly well tailored given that he was wearing them entirely too high. Atop this was what Sloane had initially parsed as a fur overcoat but was actually a cape so long that even on a man over six foot its hem pooled around his bare feet. Above his gilded and jeweled teeth were a pair of novelty plastic sunglasses, bright green with oblong lenses that gave him the look of a cartoon alien. The hand that was not busy playing pong held both his cell phone and the neck of a bottle of rosé. When he ashed his cigarette he took a drink of the wine via a looping green colored straw that turned blue when a chilled liquid passed through it.

“Hey. Brat Prince!” she called across the veranda to him

“Whaaaat?” he whined and then looked at who had called him “Oh! Hey! Dobrodošli, is Mia with you? We was texting and then she just went ghost? I think her phone might be-”

“You stupid fucking dumbass idiot baby!”

“Whoa.” he set his rosé on the table and raised his hands up like a criminal showing their open palms “Is this about the ham?”

She ignored him for a moment, instead looking to where Wesson was about to take his turn at sinking a ball “Miss that shot.”

The vampire tossed it and the ball carrened awkwardly to bounce off the edge of the table and skitter across the the wood planks.

“Hey!” Stoney said, seeming like he was no longer having a good time “I told you not to do witch shit in my fucking house.”

“Idi u pičku materinu!”

“This ain’t about the ham, is it?”

“No you fucking oaf. What is- what’s all this?”

“Whatchu mean? It’s a party, you never been to a party before?”

“Light above. C’mere, fucking, c’mon.” she waved him towards her and after a snarking sigh of protest he slinked forward so she could talk to him in a tone that wasn’t a shout “You’re either the dumbest jebeni kretenu I’ve ever met or you don’t give a shit about Mia, and hope for her sake you’re just a fucking idiot.”

The Prince had, up until now, been some mixture of confused and concerned by Sloane’s aggression, but when she lowered her voice and implied that he had been careless towards Mia he stood up straight and shook his head “Nuh-uh, nah, don’t you get to say that shit to me. You put those words right back in yo mouth.”

“Yeah? What are you going to do about it?”

“This is my house.”

“You hurt my friend.”

“I ain’t done nothing to her!”

“You Gatsby’d is what you did. Gatsby’d it right the fuck up.”

“This ain’t got nothing to do with disillusioning the jazz age! I didn’t do nothing!”

Sloane sighed “Boginja Morana, možete li verovati jajima ovog momka?”

“What’s that?” he said, his already raspy voice straining “What did you just say?”

“I said ‘Boginja Morana, možete li verovati jajima ovog momka.” on her second pass over the sentence Sloane had looked up towards the Light, her words taking on the measured pentameter of an incantation. It was not magic; like the ball she had sent off track from it’s red cup destination, she was relying on the very earthly power of suggestion and not the will of the Goddesses that were Above. As she finished the feigned incantation she pressed four fingers firm against his forehead, pushing his head back as if this shove was also part of the spell.

“Hey! Did you just do more witch shit? What did you say? Something bout my….oh shit! My-!” he did not finish his sentence before clasping a hand to his crotch “You did something to my nuts! Sloane! What the fuck you do to me!”

“Who knows?” she shrugged and turned to walk away “Witch shit.”

“SLOANE!” 

He continued to shout, too frozen in a sudden fear than she had put some kind of curse on his manhood to follow. Sloane gave him a knowing smile and left the Brat Prince to sweat as she got acquainted with the meze downstairs.


	23. Like The Dawn

Echo and Amina had known each other since the latter was born, and though they were twenty seven years apart the two women looked almost like they could be sisters. Their allegiance as vampire and concomitant was to the Veceslav-Bozhena clan, Echo having such a distance relation to the progenitor Bozhena herself that she was technically an heir herself, albeit somewhere in the triple digits of the line of succession. Both had grown bored of the Prince’s party as it stretched seemingly endlessly into another night, his need to fill the cavernous house in an effort to fight off his own loneliness nothing short of passé. Instead they took to wandering the grounds, finding vista from which to watch the night sky reflecting off the River Schuyler and happening upon a neglected rose garden that was host to overgrowth and a short haired mortal who’s eyeliner had been two lines of expertly winged black and gold before she had cried half of it into a blur. 

She gave them the name Mia, but was otherwise so unwilling to share her circumstances that she had insisted that it was allergies that rimmed her dark eyes with red. They made conversation despite this. Mia was not quite champagne-drunk but neither was she sober, and the lowered inhibition seemed to make her particularly interested in hearing about Amina’s experience as a concomitant.

“It doesn’t hurt or anything really.” she said to Mia, pulling her top down by the neck to show the slightly raised uniform circle where a port had been implanted under her skin “I’ll do fifty milliliters every week, week and a half or so. It’s really about listening to your body and knowing what’s right for you.” 

“And that’s enough for you?” she asked, glancing with still damp eyes up at Echo “Given that you’re relatively young for a vampire.”

“Mm, yeah. I make due.” Echo said and then smiled “Fifty next year, what a concept. I don’t look a day over eighteen.”

Amina rolled her eyes, having heard enough immortality based humor to last her a natural lifetime. The three talked a while longer, finishing a bottle of wine that Echo had swiped from the party and keeping the conversation going until Amina pointed out that there were still some guest who they should say hello to. Mia was invited to join them but she declined, having an apparent aversion to going inside that neither understood.

When the two were enveloped into the darkness Mia was alone again. She could the house from where she sat, it’s chimneys and high pitched roofs visible over a hill in the rolling landscape of Stoney’s estate, but if she slouched down on the bench where she sat she could make it disappear completely. She could feel the pettiness of it, the idea that she did not even want to see the tiles of his roof when she was this mad at him, but she felt it all the same. It was perhaps not even an anger towards him. Now that the two women were not occupying her with conversation Mia was creeping closer and closer to the inevitable conclusion that the person she was angry with was herself. 

Twenty years old with bleach damaged hair and an equally ill advised boyfriend, Mia had tried to set herself apart from the rest of her necrology program by not recycling the same three articles about how the prince was an insolent and disrespectful brat who reveled in exorbinance and glut. As judgemental as it was, it was not an unwarranted distaste. The Integration, for all the progress and equality it had brought, had also effectively stripped the Veceslav-Bozhena clan of any royal power. Queen Ivana had always ruled within the confines of the Rockefellian Constitution, but it had been seen as a only courtesy, and one that could be discarded if it ever came to that. With the passing of the laws that made up the Integration this freedom had been removed and vampires had become completely obliged to a government built by mortals. In the nine years passed Queen Ivana had not fought against this and a division formed between vampires who had always valued their perceived independence and those who were just happy the Integration had given them voting rights. Mia had started necrology in the midst of this disagreement, knowing as well as the undead did that there was hope for resolution had become vested in nasljednik. 

The first heir of Bijeli Kralj turned in this new era would define it. If there was ever a time to restore Rockefeller to the former King’s vision it would be under nasljednik. Even before one was announced Queen Ivana’s protégé was being held up as a savior of the honored traditions. Hundreds had showed up to his Ordainment expecting the paradigm of a restored era sat regally on his cathedra, instead they had gotten a Brat Prince who could not even bother to sit up straight in front of his subjects.

The longer Mia had to think about it the more foolish she felt for thinking there would be anything but another hedonistic party waiting for her in Black Dirt.

She swung her bag around so the strap normally positioned on her shoulder was hooked under her armpit and the bag itself formed a stiff pillow as she shifted to lie sideways on the garden bench. It was far from a comfortable way to lie, but  wasn’t so bothered by it. 

Mia had made another trip to the Šumarak the night before, something about a string of busy workdays punctuated by talking both Ela and their college friend Dušan through their recent bouts of romantic insecurity, had lowered Mia’s defenses against the constant pull of the lightless grove. The apparitions had played their loops, searching for gluten free pizza crust and sobbing and taking meandering walks to the Edelstadt overlook, and Mia wondered what had happened to their souls. Dr. Cole had raised the children under the Big God, who he called Magnus Deus, and told them the world was separated only into the righteous and the sinners. The equation was simple that way. It was more complicated when one was of the Faith of the Light. She touched the token of Dijana that had been hanging around her neck since she was a preteen and tried to feel the Goddess’s presence. Mostly she felt tired from crying. 

If she had fallen asleep it had been almost unknowingly, but when Mia woke up it was clear that several hours had passed. The sky was dark but not the pitch black it had been. She lifted her head and saw that all around her were trees, tall pointed pines that made even the sprawling castle of a house look more like a child’s plaything. Uncleared brush grew into the open lawns just like overgrowth filled the garden, and she could see small breaks in it for trails and four-wheeler paths to other parts of the seemingly endless forest. In Rockefeller every square inch of land was owned by someone, in Black Dirt it was the land that did the owning. 

Something moved at the edge of her vision and she glanced over expecting to a fox or even a bobcat tramping through the underbrush. Instead it was a much larger creature; it was the size of a dog and built similarly, but had broader paws and a muzzle that held more power in it’s bite. It took Mia a moment to realize she was looking at a grey wolf. Her eyes tried to focus in the dim light of an hour that was not yet dawn, her brain telling her she could not possibly believe what she was seeing. The wolves that had once been native to Black Dirt had been hunted to the point of non-existence a century ago, yet this one was strolling across the grass, it’s gait particularly unbothered given that half a dozen arrows seemed to be buried in it’s flesh. Her widening pupils were on the verge of being able to discern detail when she was overwhelmed by her own senses. Like trying to keep one’s eyes open when a camera flashed in a dark room, Mia’s eyes winced closed. Behind her eyelids it was not black, but red and gold. The brightest sun soaked through her skin and lit up her blood, hundreds of tiny threads making a tapestry for a moment, and then it was dark again. 

“Hey, yo, Mia, hey!” someone said as they jogged towards her. She opened her eyes and looked where the wolf had been, but saw only the shape of two men approaching, one purposeful and the other with a reluctance that he was making a point of making know.

“What-” she blinked “What are you- Wesson it’s almost dawn, you should be inside.”

“That’s what I told him,” Zeke said with crossed arms from where he stood a few feet back “But he just had to figure out where the fuck you went.”

The vampire had come down to the garden and was gently lifting Mia onto her feet “I know, I know, don’t worry about me. I can take a little light.”

“I- did you guys see that- um, that-”

“That what?”

“I thought I saw a wolf?”

Wesson and Zeke exchanged a glance “We don’t got wolves around here.”

“Yeah I know….this wasn’t….I don’t think it was a wolf.”

“Probably a fox.” Wesson said “C’mon, let’s get inside, you can crash in Zeke’s room.”

“Like fuck she can!”

“Zeke.” the vampire said firmly “She can crash in your room.”

“Fine.” he rolled his eyes and started walking. Mia followed, slinging her bag back down to its usual position and walking in pace with Wesson. As they crossed over where the wolf would have been walking she glanced down at the grass, finding that not a single blade had been displaced by the creature’s paws.


	24. Black Dirt Morning

The bed Mia woke up in the morning after the party was, without question, the most comfortable bed she had ever slept in. She reached a hand to the edge of the mattress and, feeling the edge of the pillowtop, had a suspicion that was confirmed when she pulled up a corner of the fitted sheet and saw that the bed was wrapped in the white and navy gingham that she had seen through shop windows along Zeleno Street. As if indulging some masochistic streak, she and Sloane would sometime wander around the cobblestone ways of lower Angulem, peering through the glass at designer clothes and luxury home goods that they could never afford. It was absolutely urgent that she let her friend know where she had been sleeping.

“On your right.” a voice said as Mia batted at the left side end table for her phone. She rolled over and found the electronic plugged in to charging port.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.” Zeke said, having already turned back to his video game.

Mia typed out a text and then took in the room. When Wesson had lead her in it had reminded her almost of the hotel Jasna worked at; it had been furnished with everything one needed for a stay of a few days and was lived in with the kind of haphazardness of knowing that someone else would be cleaning it tomorrow morning. The standoffish mortal had pulled a pillow and a spare blanket off the bed, making himself one of his own on the sofa that separated the sleeping and sitting area, and had apparently gone about his morning gaming as if Mia was not there.

“Hey.”

“Yeah?”

“Do you not like me?”

Zeke shrugged “You’re alright.”

“You don’t seem like you like me very much.”

“I ain’t getting attached.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

There was a moment of respite in his game as some new part of the map loaded, Zeke sighed and half turned on the sofa to face her “It’s supposed to mean I don’t forsee you sticking around for long is all.”

“Wow. Okay.” 

She pushed the blanket off her legs and got up, the carpet plush under foot. She had slept with her jeans unbuttoned but on all the same, when she stood she pulled them up over the soft part of her stomach and fastened them. The boots she had kicked off a few hours ago were now upright, placed intentionally by the bedside, the sheathed dagger sewn into one of them was more than obvious to whoever had set them there. An uneasy feeling turned over in Mia’s gut.

“Nah.” Zeke said without turning

“What?”

“That vibe you’re putting out….nah.”

“Oh, okay….oh?” Mia stumbled slightly, realizing she was not the only person in the room who could feel her emotions “You’re Empático?”

“Clearly.” he rolled his eyes “If it’s the knife you worried about, yeah, Wesson saw it, nah, he don’t care. Rockefeller’s a rough place, gotta protect yourself from all sorts.”

“Yeah….um, I- actually I’m going to go.” Mia did not need preternatural perception to know that he was uninterested in any further conversation. She ran her hands over a head of hair that needed to be buzzed again and made sure her cowlick was cooperating before leaving the room. Zeke made no motion to acknowledge her exit.

She had seen Stoney’s house in the background of video calls plenty of times before, the other day he had lost track of his favorite shirt and spent nearly half an hour walking from room to room and looking with an increasingly furrowed brow as he failed to find the oversized acid wash tie-dye garment that was screen printed with the image of a cat who was a wizard. After a while he had given up, sitting dejectedly on his closet floor surrounded by a selection of clothes that made it look like he had walked into the designer shops of Zeleno Street and simply bought out the entire store. 

Mia was in a different part of the house than this though, as she curiously cracked open doors she found more guest bedrooms with the beds unmade but unoccupied, a laundry room and hall bath, a home theater with seating for a dozen, and a wet bar with a fridge that she was hoping contained bottle water but when opened revealed only domestic lite beer and imported champagne. She closed it and continued searching.

Like the gingham print horsehair mattress, there was no debate that this was the nicest house she had ever been in. It was furnished with a certain sparseness, not one of aesthetic minimalism but one of someone who had never had a spare bedroom in his life and then quite suddenly had nine of them. Accent chairs upholstered in Gallia Belgican linen, black bamboo occasional tables, and shagreen wrapped credenzas existed in wide hallways without any real purpose. As she passed from the west section of the house to the east via a balcony that overlooked a two story reception hall, Mia noticed that a number of these pieces had been shoved together and draped in blankets to form a half finished and abandoned fort. A wall of electrochromic glass was darkened to keep out the rays that harmed the virus animating the undead, but was translucent enough to show a yard and pool littered with broken bottles, tossed over furniture, and all manner of party refuse.

She followed a meandering path to find an upstairs rec room that was host to another kind of party refuse; several vampires who had not left before dawn and were now lolling around as they recovered from hangovers and comedowns from last night’s drugs. The sound of the video game two were playing on a projection screen were kept to a minimum, another on a PC was speaking with a telltale hushness into his mic; the only sound that was not intentionally dampened was the buzz of a tattoo gun which itself stopped when Flint looked up to see who had walked into the room.

“Aye! Necrologist!” he said with a grin that’s wideness was rivaled only by Brando. The darker haired vampire’s smile was tinged with a wince, as it was his lower back that was the canvas for Flint’s tattooing. 

“Hi.” she said, processing the sight of Brando lying stomach down on a coffee table, sipping coconut water out of a bendy straw and smoking a joint that he passed to Flint. A gentleman in his own right, the blond vampire held the half burnt roll of of paper and leaves out to Mia after he had filled his own lungs. She took a hit and coughed when she began to exhale a moment later “Oh fuck, you don’t fuck around with your weed, do you?”

“Course we don’t.” he said “You sleep good?”

“Mm, half of it was on a stone bench and half of it was on an absolute dream bed but also my internal clock is fucked so it’s been a real mixed bag.”

“The beds here kick ass. Lux hired this thing called a lifestyle curators, every time we come up there’s a new heated toilet seat or an electric milk frother attachment.”

“Huh.” Mia said, the only thing striking her more that the absurdity of Stoney having hired something of a governess to replace their official steward and that governess hiring yet another handler of household management to tell the Prince what luxury goods to buy, was a curiosity about how the frother did with non-dairy milks. “Kind of interested in knowing more about that milk thing, actually.”

“Yeah? You want a coffee? Do you drink flat whites?”

“Um, yeah, well, dairy free ones.”

Flint nodded and then shouted so his deep voice carried over the loft railing and down to the great room below “Kofi! Kofi! Brew me a coffee! Use bademovo mlijeko!”

“Bitch, use your manners!” a voice called back up

“Brew me a coffee, Daddy!”

There was a laugh from downstairs, followed by the sound of espresso beans being ground. Flint went back to his tattooing, Brando went back to his wincing, and Mia made her way down a staircase that was not the one she had used to get upstairs in the first place. 

She had smelled the kitchen before seeing it, coffee and bacon and palačinke all wafting up from the room below the loft. Kofi finished fiddling with a built in espresso machine and went back to pouring rounds of batter on a flat top griddle that was set out on the island while a self-appointed sous chef smeared hazelnut spread across the finished crêpes. Post-party idlers were gathered around a curving breakfast bar or draped across living room furniture. A few women had tasked themselves with cleaning up, retrieving armfuls of half empty beers and champagne flutes and pouring their bubbleless contents into the prep sink before tossing them in a recycling bag or a dishwasher. A young man with several days of stubble and the beginnings of forehead wrinkles looked both familiar and foreign as he sat in the doorway of a pantry slowly eating frozen grapes, and it took Mia a moment to recognize his face as that of former international teen pop sensation Jace Maverick. Across the kitchen from the aging idol was an equally bleary eyed vampire recovering from a hang over of his own. He sat up on the counter beside the range, sucking down a cigarette and blowing smoke into the exhaust fan of the hammered copper hood above. He had traded his garish garb of the night before for boxers and a tee shirt advertising some local bar’s hot wing challenge, making his large frame small with his knees up to his chest, arms wrapped around shins, and head of wispy haphazard curls tilted to the side as if he was about to fall asleep on his own shoulder.

Mia had waited weeks and traveled hours to see Stoney, and done so with a feeling of excitement and perhaps something else too welling inside her. But the party had caught her off guard, her hip was sore from the bench and she had not yet petted Clegane, Zeke had been standoffish to her and she wanted to put her bag down in a bedroom that was not borrowed from someone that seemingly did not want her there. Most of all she wanted to be happy to see him, but it seemed that this was yet another thing that was not working out as she had hoped. 

“Is this my coffee?” she said, stepping into the kitchen and walking past the stove without so much as acknowledging that a vampire was sitting beside it

“Mm,” Kofi nodded towards the machine built into a cabinet that was currently filling a ceramic cup with espresso

“Cool.” she said

As she waited for the coffee to finish she checked her phone, typing out a response to what Sloane had texted her and then looking curiously at the great room which the kitchen opened up to. It was impressive in both expanse and volume, though like the rest of the house proved to be almost too large be furnished in any sort of coherent way. The biggest flatscreen tv available was still dwarfed on the otherwise blank wall where it was mounted and a deep cushioned sectional that could comfortably sleep a dozen still left plenty of floorspace for a ping pong table and an entire grand piano, both of which looked like they were more often used as somewhere to set beers than for their intended purpose. Mia could feel Stoney’s eyes on her back as she considered the humor in the fact that someone had stuck a basketball hoop up among the beams of the vaulted ceiling.

Beside her the espresso machine and its attached milk frother sputtered out the last of their liquid, and Mia took the cup from its tray. For all the ridiculous and needless luxury of the estate, she did like feeling as if she was a woman in an advertisement for coffee beans, and walked over to the great room windows to hold the mug in both hands while she looked out onto the forest and the hills rising in the distance. 

“Hey!” Stoney hopped down from the counter and crossed the kitchen with a determined gait. He was no longer content in being ignore and strode over to where Mia stood

“Oh, I’m sorry, were we acting like I was here to see you?” she turned to face him. He stood almost a foot taller than her and had stepped close so that they could speak to each other in tones that were not overheard by others, but Mia was not interest in subtleness “Because I sure didn’t get that indication last night when there were, mmm, a couple hundred strangers here doing Necro and breaking your shit.”

He rubbed one eye with the pad of his thumb while still holding his cigarette “I kicked them all out though.”

“Stoney, there’s still like thirty people here.”

“Yeah well, fractions.” he shrugged

“You can’t just say ‘fractions’ as if that means literally anything. When you said you were having some other people over I thought you meant a few of your friends because you didn’t want Sloane to feel like a third wheel, not that you were having a full on live fast die never rager because you’re too fucking dumb to realize that I’m not here for the Brat Prince.”

“W-who are you here for then?”

Presented with Mia’s decision to pretend as if he did not exist until absolutely having to, Stoney had taken on the tactic of pretending he was not bothered by this. It had lasted all of forty five seconds before his voice wavered and he glanced unsurely around.

“Yo,” Kofi said from the kitchen as he turned his attention up from the griddle “It’s still you, bro. She using the sobriquet like a metaphor for the duality of your identity.” 

“Oh.” he said and looked back at Mia “So you ain’t mad at me?”

“No, I am.”

Again Kofi cleared his throat “C’mon bro, you know this shit. The lady is interested in the contents of your soul, not how hard you can ball. You’re trying to stay looking cool but that ain’t what she wants. Authenticity is a form of vulnerability and, in a relationship that subscribes to a heteronormative structure, male vulnerability is intimate as hell. You can’t symbolically rescind that shit without making her feel jilted.”

“I just wanted her-” he started and then changed who he was speaking to “I wanted you to think I was cool is all. We been partying for a couple days and I knew it was getting outta hand with all the Necro but I thought- I thought doing some rockstar shit was cooler than me sitting around in my underwear playing Rub Univerzuma all day.”

Mia sighed and took a sip of her coffee before speaking “I’ve been working about sixty hours a week almost every week for the past four years of my life. Did you know that?”

“Yeah, you work a lot.”

“It’s because of the student debt.” she said “The mere idea of being able to sit around in my underwear playing Rub Univerzuma all day without feeling like I’m being financially irresponsible sounds like the coolest and most baller thing I can think of.”

“Oh.” he thought for a moment “I can pay off your loans if you want. I got a quarterly cap on how much money I make and the rest goes to charities and shit but I bet Lux can make a charity for your debt or something.” 

“Light Above, Stoney.” Mia pinched the bridge of her nose

“What? What do you want from me? Tell me what you want and I’ll do it.”

“I just want to hang out with you.”

“That- I’m all you want.”

“Yeah, dumbass.” she rolled her eyes “You know for a notoriously self involved prince you’re weirdly oblivious to the fact that like, aside from having somewhere to put my bag and wash my face, the thing that I’ve wanted the most since getting here is just to be alone with you.”

“Oh….why you wanna be alone with me if you mad at me?”

“I’m mad that I haven’t been alone with you.”

“You ain’t gonna hit me or nothing, right?”

“No! Light Above, why would I hit you?”

Stoney looked at her for a moment, searching her face with a slight look of confusion and skepticism on his own. He seemed to find whatever he was looking for because another moment later he rolled his shoulders back and regained his typical demeanor 

“Ništa, ništa.” he waved it “You uh, I can take your bag for you and I think there’s gotta be some of that uh….mice….miracle….micera….water in Saph’s part of the house. That’s what you use on your eyes, right?”

“Yeah, micellar water.” 

“Bet.” he nodded and extended a hand so he could carry her bag for her. He slung it over one arm instead of across his body, the pack of durable fabric and adjustable rope strap that was sized to Mia’s torso not fitting across his. They were staying until dawn on Monday and when she had shown up to their car with just her sling bag on her shoulder Sloane had looked at her own bulging weekend bag but not commented; she already knew that a younger Mia had been taught how to pack a compact go-bag as thoroughly as she had been taught the alphabet. 

Stoney snuffed out his cigarette in the empty beer he had been ashing into and nodded for her to follow him.

The part of the house belonging to Sapphire was nearly a house of its own. Settled above a six car garage, the two bedroom, two bath apartment had an open plan kitchen that had never been used for anything other than ‘what I eat in a day’ vlogs and a place referred to as the ‘beauty room’ where Stoney went to scrounge up some skincare. Mia stayed standing in the living/dining room they had entered into, finding that this was where the other necrologist had slept. Sloane had raised her head off the bare chest of the woman who she had spent a night in front of the fireplace with, gave Mia a thumbs up, and immediately fell back asleep. 

“Good morning,” the woman, pink haired and seemly very comfortable with lying naked on a sheepskin rug, smiled up at the mortal and vampire who had come in unannounced. 

“Morning.” Stoney said striding past the sight without a second glance “Ness, this is Mia, Mia this is-”

“Vanessa Vanity.” Mia said, cutting him off “And also Sloane.”

The social media model raised her perfect eyebrows and motioned to the sleeping necrologist “You know each other?”

“Yeah, we came up together, well, you know, not, together together. We came up at the same time because we’re friends and we work together.”

“Oh, fun.” she said pleasantly

“Yeah,” Mia nodded and looked around. Stoney had dipped into the other room and she was at a lost of wether she should join him or sit down on one of the nearby sofas. A silence so unbroken they could hear the hum of the refrigerator hung in the air for too many moments, making Mia conscious of it in a way that she startled when it was interrupted by a shout from the beauty room.

“You traitor!” Stoney shouted dramatically, tossing a pale pink travel bag of pale pink skincare bottles across the apartment so it skittered to the floor between the women “A turncoat in my castle! A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!”

“It came in a PR package!” Vanessa rolled her eyes and laughed as Sloane stirred but was content in ignoring everything that was not postcoital cuddling “Saph and I are doing a first impression review tonight.”

“She really selling products for mortal skin when she ain’t had it herself for ten years, huh?” he came out of the room with a bottle of micellar water and a few other products that did not belong to the brand of the vampire with whom he had had a very public breakup a few years prior. “I thought she was making shapewear now.”

“No, that’s Ceres, Eris is expanding her brand to skincare.”

“Same clan.” Stoney shrugged “Suljo’s whole brood is a money factory.”

At this Vanessa looked from the Prince to Mia and back at the Prince with a loaded glance “Does she know about your arrangement with the Vasilii?”

“I ain’t gonna bore her with clan politics.” he waved of whatever it was that the mortal model has thought was important for Mia to know “You said you and Saph are filming today?”

“Tonight.” she said firmly

“Can you go get her though?”

“No, Stoney, the whole reason she stays in the cottages is because she wants to be left alone at least until after sundown. I already texted her, she’s fine on her own.”

“She told me the same thing but she won’t tell me if she did Necro last night.”

“It’s Sapphire, of course she did.”

The Prince sighed and grumbled indistinctly. He seemed as if he was going to sulk for a moment and then remembered himself, or more specifically, Mia. 

“Sorry,” he said quietly, rounding his shoulders

“About what?”

“This, I don’t know, the party got outta hand and you didn’t have a good time and that sucks, and now you gotta see me stressing about Saph, that’s my fault letting people bring Necro into my house just cause I don’t know how to say no to nobody.” he looked down and kicked a bare foot on the planks of lime washed birch that ran the length of the apartment “I ain’t a very good host, am I?”

“Well, I mean, it could’ve been a better first impression but….even the ‘I have to do this interview in person in Black Dirt’ is kind of just a ruse for the sake of professionalism. I’m really just here to see you. I really don’t mind if you life is kind of messy and not like, the lavish luxury life you like the people of Rockefeller to think you have.”

“Just here to see me, that’s the second time you’ve said that.”

“That’s because it’s true and I tend to say things that are truthful.”

“Yeah?”

“Mhm.”

Vanessa scoffed from where she was still lying a few feet away “Ugh, get a room.”

“Šuti,” Stoney wrinkled his nose at her “You fucked on the ground, you životinja.”

“That’s because Sapphire is an actual hurricane and every other inch of this place looks like it, and at least I fucked someone last night.”

Stoney made another gesture towards her and then hitched Mia’s bag up on his shoulder with that hand that did not have ‘jebi se’ tattooed along the middle finger “C’mon Lady, you can wash your face in my room.”


	25. Clementine

Upon seeing the shower in the master bathroom of Stoney’s estate, Mia was left with little option but to experience the steaming, streaming water room for herself. After washing and indulging in a few high kicks to properly celebrate the fact that she was not showering in a compact stall for the several hundredth time, she wrapped herself up and made her way into the bedroom. Above her was a fresco painted on a domed ceiling and several suction cup tipped foam darts that had been shot up to such a height without any idea for how they were getting down, around her were clothes that had not made it into a laundry basket and several posters one would expect to be taped to dorm room walls instead of tacked into fine damask wallpaper. Absent from the space though was the Brat Prince himself.

She looked around the still room; at the chair of his desk, the mat for Clegane in front of the fireplace, the video game controller set on a table, the bed where Stoney slept. It was perhaps the only private place in a house so open to whatever guests came through its doors, and he had left her here unattended and unobserved. 

“Sanja®️?” she said, and the ceiling lights glowed turquoise for a moment

“I’m sorry, I don’t recognize this user. Please speak more-”

“Off.” she said and the lights turned back to their warm white tone

She was going to have sex this weekend, of this Mia was sure, but the details surrounding the act had never been discussed. As she unrolled a pair of leggings from her bag and stepped into them she wondered if she should be pulling them on in the first place, or if the Prince was accustomed to nude bodies laid on on his bed for him, already yielded and ready for the taking. She took off the borrowed robe completely and pulled a tank top over her head, trying to ignore the uneasy feeling bubbling inside her.

They had not once talked about this. Racy comments and double entendres had been sprinkled through idle conversation since they met, but it had always been more flirtatious than truly telling. Mia did not know if he was expecting something from her, if the selfish Brat Prince would demand too much of her, if someone who had been unfazed by the body of a model earlier that morning felt entitled to such a pristine form. She had seen her share of low quality pulp erotica where a milk-skinned virgin was ravaged by the beast, defiled by the undead, and taken with force by a monstrous creature, but now that Mia herself was the maiden in the vampire’s bed chamber the brutality of it all did not feel so titillating. 

A door opened and Mia clutched her bag to her chest, suddenly breathless where she was standing like a foal on unsteady feet. Stoney let the heavy wood swing closed behind him and gave Mia a slight smile when he entered.

“Sorry, should’ve knocked.” he crossed the room to sit on the edge of his bed, looking more at the clementine he was peeling and eating than at her “How was your shower?”

“Good, yeah, it was- it’s a really big shower.”

“Yeah. I tried covering the drains and filling it up one time, like a people-fishtank but, uh, it didn’t go well. I guess regular glass don’t work like that.” he said with a wistful sigh, as if failing to turning his shower into a personal aquarium was one of his greatest disappointment. He let the feeling pass and then patted the bit of mattress next to him “C’mere.”

She crossed the room as well, feeling the same plush support as the bed she had slept on, though this one was far more broken in along the side, as if time had been spent sitting along its perimeter. He was still wearing just his boxers and a shirt, and it occurred to Mia now, her legging covered thigh almost touching his, that she had never seen Stoney’s bare legs before. The long limbs below his boxer shorts were largely unremarkable, expectedly scribbled with a handful of tattoos that looked like they too had been drawn by Flint instead of the more professional work on his upper body. Arced over each kneecap were easily recognized Nirvana lyrics and one shin sporting the portrait of an easily frightened and ironically named cartoon dog from their childhood. There was a certain humor in it. While tattoos had fallen out of favor with Common Era vampires who sought to separate themselves from carnival performers and ship workers, there was hardly a surviving Old One who was had not embedded their skin with ink. In college she had taken a freshman course studying the runes and scared geometry of the Great Clans and felt silly for the lack of meaning in her already blown out ankle tattoo. She wondered now if a necrology student a thousand years in the future would write a term paper on the Brat Prince’s ancient tattoos while feeling like their were slapdash and shallow in comparison.

He peeled another section of the orange free from the whole and wordlessly offered it to Mia. The tenderness of this was not lost on her, and was only made more apparent by the fact that Stoney did not immediately pull his hand back; instead letting it drop to lightly touch her collarbone as she pressed her teeth into the flesh of the fruit. His fingertips left her skin only to break off another section for himself, then another for her, and back and forth a few more times until they had eaten the clementine completely and he leaned away to set the unfurled rind on a bedside table.

“You never really struck me as the kind of guy to eat fruit.” she said when he was facing her again, now turned sideways so his chest and his body was even with hers.

“I ain’t.” he said “But you said one time that since you quit cigarettes you don’t like the taste of them no more, so I thought….I thought I should eat an orange or something.” 

“I have a very, um, fraught relationship with smoking. I actually love cigarettes but I do take issue with the fact that they will kill you if you smoke them long enough.”

“I don’t really gotta worry about that, do I?”

“Yeah, I guess not.”

Stoney half laughed and leaned to lie flat across the bed. Mia stayed sitting up, feeling his eyes on her back for the second time that morning, though this time the tension of it was broken by the feeling of his hand running slowly along her spine. 

“Do you want me to stop?” he asked softly after seemingly too long passed without any kind of response from the necrologist

“No, it’s- um, I mean-” she laughed nervously and the took a deep breath that did nothing to calm her jitters before she leaned down and kissed him. It was an unhurried kind of kissing, one that was almost timid in comparison to the intensity with which they had made out when they had meet at Davidović’s. Her hand would have shook if it was not steadied on his chest and when she straightened up again she could feel her heartbeat pounding “Light Above, I need to fucking relax.”

“It’s fine,” he said, taking her hand and putting it back on his chest while guiding her to rest her head on his shoulder “I’m immortal, remember, I got all the time in the world.”

“Oh, is that how it works?” she laughed

“Mhm, I said it so it true now.”

“Wow, such power. A decree straight from the lips of Njegovo Kraljevsko Visočanstvo Prince Stoney, First Turned and Heir Apparent to the Throne of Rockefeller. What a mouthful of a title that is.”

“That’s the short version.”

“I know. I was the first person in my Heritage & History class to get your full title memorized after your Ordainment.”

“Y’all have some kind of competition going?”

“Mmmm it was more that I changed the direction of my major pretty much the moment you were announced so, you know, it made the fangirl label pretty inescapable and I figured I might as well embrace it.”

“I’m honored.” he laughed and kissed the top of her head

Mia settled more against him now, her chest against his ribs, one leg slung over his with her toes touching his calf like a game of footsie for pair with a noticeable height difference. As quiet as Stoney’s body was without breath or a beating heart, he seemed unable to keep still. He had need to trap one hand under the back of his own head assumably to keep it from trailing meandering paths over Mia’s body like the fingertips of the other was doing. She got the impression that he was mapping the very topography of her body, committing every contour and crook to memory so he could bring it back to mind when only the pixels of a small screen were bridging the gap between them.

“I want to know something about you.” she said into the side of his chest

“Mm? What kind of something?”

“Just whatever,” she shrugged “Something you haven’t told me yet, like something you don’t tell most people.”

“Hmm,” he thought for a moment, drawing lazy circles across her back as he turned it over in his mind, searching for the right thing to say. “I think Bigfoot is real.”

Mia lifted her head “What?”

“He gotta be right? How could so many people be seeing something that ain’t real unless he is real?”

“No, yeah, I know the argument I just,” she laughed “I meant something personal.”

“I personally think that Bigfoot’s gotta be real.”

“Okay, sure.”

“What about you?”

“Are we still talking about Bigfoot or….”

“I could talk about him all day if you wanna. There’s this show on the internet, they’re like ghost hunters except one of the guys don’t believe in ghosts, but, get this, he thinks Bigfoot is scientifically grounded. We got all sorts of shit out here that the city don’t got; demons, wendigos, trees that move when you ain’t looking, deer with teeth like dogs.”

“I really got you on a tangent, didn’t I?”

“Blame Kofi, he got me into all this shit.”

“Mm, that makes sense.” she said, and having sat up slightly during his pitch for the plausibility of the bipedal cryptid, settled back down with her face in her curve of Stoney’s neck this time. “I like that I’m starting to get a read on the personalities of your friends.”

“Me too.”

She closed her eyes, content in the fact that she was lying in a bed again but not particularly interest in sleeping just yet. Mia could feel the vampire shifting against her, the coarse hair on the lower half of his face bristling a little on her forehead as he moved. Mia’s own face drifted upwards. The warmth of her body seeping into his as she brought their lips level. They were kissing again, still slowly but more assured this time. The taste of his lips had startled her in Rockefeller, the sensation almost disconcerting among the chatter and the congestion of the city. But here in Black Dirt, where the air passed through the pitch pine and sycamore trees of the Schuyler Highlands, she recognized the snap of crispness it left in her own mouth. The most ancient undead traced their blood to the snow dusted peaks of Dinaridi Planine, and when she kissed Stoney she could taste the mountains on his tongue. 

It was not just her body heat now, the bane inside him knew the business of mortals, a single convulsion of his heart betrayed Stoney’s composure as he tried not to push down the waistband of her leggings quiet yet.

“I’m going to take your shirt off, I think.” Mia said, her lips curved into a smile against his as she stopped to speak for a moment

“Okay,” he nodded and then asked “In a fangirl kind of way or….”

“Šuti. I knew I shouldn’t have called myself a fangirl, now I’m never going to live that down.” she rolled her eyes “Senpai noticed me, but at what cost?”

Stoney laughed and raised his arms so she could lift up his shirt. She tossed it aside and touched his bare chest, still cool like clay but not icy like it would be if he had been if he had been idle before getting an orange from the kitchen. Mia had not been the only one restless with anticipation before this.

“Still nervous?” he asked, looking down at her wandering hands

“I don’t think so,” she said softly and when she looked up he leaned in to kiss her. The Brat Prince in his lavish estate had, in the very core of him, the greed of an insatiable hunger. He kissed Mia now as if he was starving, his lips hungry on hers and then along her jaw and onto her neck. A sound escaped her mouth and she attempted to mask the moan with a swear “Fuck,”

Stoney rolled her onto her back, pushed her legs apart with his knee and made room for his hips between her thighs.

“I’m stronger than a mortal,” he said, sliding one hand under her back “Is it okay with you if I act like it?”

When Mia nodded he lifted her as if she weighed nothing, then tossed her back onto the bed so they were not on the edge of it. It was, she thought to herself, a good thing that she had pulled on some clothes. The joy with which Stoney tugged off her legging was matched only by the grin that spread across his face when he put his head between her legs, her breath hitched, and another moan came out not with a swear but the sound of her saying his name. 


End file.
